The naked mole-rat is an odd beast. With its bare, pink skin and huge protruding incisors, this East African rodent is sometimes described as a hot dog with teeth.

It spends most of its time in dark tunnels, so its vision is limited, but it can navigate both forward and backward with ease, aided by sensory hairs at either end. Socially, it is strange, too: with a single breeding queen supported by scores of workers, a mole-rat colony is the mammalian equivalent of a beehive.

This is because the mole-rat uses its teeth to eat, dig, move objects and communicate.