-(1).jpg "The Long, Strange Life of the World’s Oldest Naked Mole Rat")
The Long, Strange Life of the World’s Oldest Naked Mole Rat
Joe has looked old since the day he was born, back in 1982. He’s pink and squinty and wrinkly. His teeth are weird: His incisors sit outside his lips to keep the dirt out of his mouth as he digs tunnels for his tube-shaped body.
“He looks remarkably the same,” says Rochelle Buffenstein, a comparative biologist who has studied naked mole rats since the 1980s when she was doing her doctoral work in Cape Town, South Africa. That’s where she met Joe. (He doesn’t have an official name, so we’re going with Joe.) A few years later, Buffenstein was starting her own research on vitamin D metabolism in mole rats because they spend all their time in dark tunnels, away from the sun. She moved to Johannesburg with a few subjects to begin her work, leaving Joe behind. He was eventually shipped off to the Cincinnati Zoo. But he and Buffenstein would soon reunite.
“They were more than 15 years old, which is by rodent standards extremely long-lived,” Buffenstein says. “So I thought, ‘Wow, they should be only living a maximum of six years; they’re living more than double their maximum life span.’” She pivoted to aging research, knowing that the field was important but understudied. In the early 2000s, Joe’s other half at the zoo passed away, and he needed a new mate. Buffenstein offered to help him start a new colony at her lab in New York and took him in. Since then, he has traveled with Buffenstein to research posts in New York, Texas, and California.
