Animal personality traits (consistent behavioral differences between individuals in their behavior across time and/or situation) affect individual fitness through facets, such as dispersal. In eusocial naked mole-rat ...

Mole-rats are champions of self-preservation, with increased longevity compared with other rodents their size, strong antioxidant capabilities and specialized defenses against endogenous oxidative stress. However, how ...

Circadian rhythms of locomotor activity have been investigated in several African mole-rat species. Even though mole-rats spend most of their lives in underground burrows devoid of light, studies have shown that they do ...

The Bathyergidae, commonly known as blesmols or African mole-rats, is a family of rodents well-known for their subterranean lifestyle and tunnelling behaviour. Four of the five extant bathyergid genera (Cryptomys, Fukomys, ...

The specialization of individuals in specific behavioural tasks is often attributed either to irreversible differences in development, which generate functionally divergent cooperative phenotypes, or to agerelated changes ...

The genus Heliophobius Peters, 1846 is an ancient subterranean rodent lineage within the family Bathyergidae that displays seasonal breeding over a broad geographical range. In East Africa, reproduction in these solitary ...

In social mole-rats, breeding females are larger and more elongated than non-breeding female helpers. This status-related morphological divergence is thought to arise from modifications of skeletal growth following the ...

Sex allocation theory predicts that mothers benefit from adjusting the sex ratio of their offspring in relation to their offspring's future reproductive success. In cooperative breeders, parents are expected to bias the ...

Individual variation in growth rates often generates variation in fitness. However, the ability to draw meaningful inferences from growth data depends on the use of growth models that allow for direct comparisons of growth ...