WAMU 88.5 : Metro Connection  Filed Under:  Naked Mole Rats: The
Animal Kingdom's Most Functional Dysfunctional Family  Play
associated audio The naked mole rat lives as bees or ants do —
in a colony with a queen and soldiers. Sabri Ben-Achour  Naked
mole rats are very cute, in a very ugly way.  "They have very
little hair, no fur, some whiskers, some hair between their
toes, like hobbits, and actually some hair inside of their
mouth, which keeps their mouth nice and clean while they dig
because they dig with their teeth, says David Kessler with the
Smithsonian's National Zoo. "They're virtually blind 'cause they
spend their entire lives underground, their skin is very thin
and wrinkly, and almost translucent."  The teeth are gruesome,
frankly. They stick out through the lips, the top pair coming
out just below the nostrils. Naked mole rats can chew through
concrete and bite through a human hand. They spend their lives
burrowing beneath the East African dirt in search of giant
tubers and roots.  They are fles