Naked mole rat writes a personals ad

Wrinkly tuber

teeth that chew through concrete

on snake stakeout

plotting the queen’s overthrow.

Pay me not very much

of exactly the right

kind of attention.

Degrees of Company

Like your typical molerat, I live in a tunnel, well part of the time. But that's another story. Unlike your typical molerat, I live here alone. No queens bossing me, no other molerats working harder than I do, making me feel like a slacker. I'm the only one. I like it that way, but sometimes I yearn for company. I've been trying out different forms of company lately, and think that I have arrived at exactly what I'm looking for. There's a lava lamp with unusual blue globules. It's less company than an aquarium, but more than a screen saver. I turn it off when I leave the tunnel and it goes into suspended animation. It's very entertaining watching it slowly return to life when I switch it back on. There are also a variety of wind-up toys, which are a little more company than the lava lamp in that they make noise and require not just one flick of a switch, but frequent winding if they are to do anything. I used to have a chameleon, the old world kind with the turret eyes and prehensile tail. It was very much like a wind-up toy, except it wound itself up.  

Tunnel Ahead

A molerat lives underground and builds tunnels. Sometimes in its tunneling it encounters a tuber. This is good. Sometimes it encounters a slab of concrete. This is not so good. The molerat's success lies in its ability to adapt effectively to the tuber and the concrete - at far opposite ends of the underground spectrum - as well as other discoveries, for example a scientist intent on studying the molerat. The International Molerat Review is a network of tunnels, all of which begin with exploration and experiment. Some arrive at dead ends, others become as intricate and subtle as labyrinths. There are little rooms off the tunnels as well, places where molerats can get a little respite from tunneling and do whatever else it is they do. It is several days later and I am editing this post to include the first in what I hope will become a series of comparisons and contrasts of molerats and other denizens of our universe. A molerat and a street sweeper, for example. A street sweeper operates above ground, and is perhaps for this reason noisier than a molerat operating in the subterrain. I suspect a street sweeper would not eat a tuber, even if one found its way into a gutter, though a street sweeper would respond to a slab of concrete in a similar manner to a molerat. I suspect that there are scientists studying street sweepers, but I doubt the street sweepers themselves have to adapt much to this. Street sweepers don't have fangs,and they aren't wrinkly. Street sweepers do not appear to be organized socially, with a queen, workers, and drones. They are all pretty much workers. The turning radius of a molerat and a street sweeper are about the same, proportional to the size of their respective bodies.