![\"Naked](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/d41586-026-02168-2_52970842.jpg\"\/)
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Naked mole-rat queens produce a chemical that stops other females from reproducing.Credit: Neil Bromhall\/Getty<\/p>\n
Naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber) queens produce a chemical that prevents other females in their colony from reproducing.<\/p>\n
A study published today in Nature suggests that this compound maintains a strict social structure that is dominated by one queen, even when the animal is not present1<\/a>. The chemical\u2019s odour alters the production of hormones in other females, which stifles their ability to bear young.<\/p>\n The study is a \u201cgame changer\u201d, says Melissa Holmes, a behavioural neuroscientist at the University of Toronto, Canada, because it explains \u201ca longstanding mystery\u201d: why only one female in a naked mole-rat colony reproduces.<\/p>\n All for one<\/p>\n Known for their hardiness<\/a> and unusual longevity<\/a>, naked mole-rats are eusocial, which is extremely rare in mammals. In this social structure, the queen is responsible for all reproduction in its colony, while other, infertile individuals rear the offspring and complete laborious tasks such as gathering food.<\/p>\n However, unlike other eusocial animals, such as bees, every female naked mole-rat can become a queen. But most are stuck in a \u201cstalled puberty phase\u201d, says Lisa Stowers, a neuroscientist at Scripps Research in San Diego, California. These females\u2019 reproductive organs are underdeveloped, and levels of the hormone prolactin are elevated. But how one female holds on to the throne, and halts reproduction in others, has been a mystery.<\/p>\n To find out, Mohammed Khallaf, a neuroscientist at the Max Delbr\u00fcck Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, and his colleagues swabbed naked mole-rats of different social ranks to determine the odour chemicals that they produced. One, called isopropyl myristate (IPM), was found in abundance in queens and was almost entirely absent from other colony members. Production of this compound fluctuates with the queen\u2019s reproductive cycle, peaking during ovulation.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were really aiming to just identify the chemical profile of the naked mole-rats,\u201d says Khallaf. \u201cI got very excited when we found this compound that\u2019s only produced by the queen.\u201d<\/p>\n Brain imaging showed that exposure to IPM stimulated olfactory neurons \u2014 those responsible for processing information about incoming smells \u2014 in non-breeding females, which suggests that these individuals react to the chemical\u2019s scent.<\/p>\n To pinpoint the chemical\u2019s effects, the team removed some non-breeding females from the colony and used a drug to block the ability to smell in others. In both instances, the mole-rats\u2019 levels of prolactin dropped, enabling those that were paired with males to mate. The presence of IPM alone \u2014 even in the absence of a queen \u2014 was enough to block reproduction and maintain the status quo in a colony, further experiments showed.<\/p>\n \u2018Heroic\u2019 effort<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Naked mole-rat queens produce a chemical that stops other females from reproducing.Credit: Neil Bromhall\/Getty Naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber)…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":937499,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[8],"tags":[81234,80928,10046,10047,44275,159,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-937498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-animal-behaviour","tag-chemical-biology","tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","tag-multidisciplinary","tag-physiology","tag-science","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116926389335874232","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/937498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=937498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/937498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/937499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=937498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=937498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=937498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}