When a naked mole rat queen dies, that usually means war—but not for this colony

There’s a moment in the lab when you can tell something unexpected is happening. For naked mole rats, it’s not supposed to be gentle.

When a queen dies in most naked mole rat colonies, studies have long pointed to a brutal reshuffling: other females rise up, attacks follow, pups get targeted, and one winner ends up as the sole breeding female. It’s the kind of outcome that matches the logic of eusocial life—strict roles, tightly controlled reproduction, and enforcement that costs energy and can even injure rivals. In other words, “queen succession” is usually shorthand for “all hell breaks loose.”

Misryoum newsroom reported a new study that complicates that picture. At the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, a queen named Teré didn’t just fade into replacement by violence. Instead, she “peacefully handed her power to one of her daughters,” with no death or gore necessary. The work comes out of the idea that, in some conditions, the hierarchy might have more flexibility than researchers assumed.

Naked mole rats are eusocial: most colony members are support staff, while a single female—the queen—holds the reproductive reins. This division has parallels in beehives and ant colonies, and it generally makes sense in relatively stable, predictable environments like the arid regions of sub-Saharan Africa where these animals live in the wild, according to Misryoum newsroom reporting. But even there, the reproductive setup has vulnerabilities. If only one female’s genes are producing pups, then the colony’s offspring may not always include enough genetic diversity to ride out harsh surprises like disease or an environmental catastrophe. And the queen’s violent enforcement of dominance isn’t free, either—energetically costly, and potentially harmful.

That uncertainty—whether there’s room for “wiggle” inside a system designed to be rigid—drove the experiments. According to Misryoum editorial team stated, Shanes Abeywardena, a postdoctoral researcher in Ayres’s lab, and colleagues wanted to test whether multiple queens could coexist peacefully rather than through violent queen wars. They started in July 2019 with a small, well-functioning family: one queen (Teré), one reproductive male, and four pups (one male). To mimic “the queen is dead”–type scenarios without removing the animal in charge, the researchers manipulated conditions thought to affect her reproductive activity—such as increasing the number of pups in her kingdom or relocating the colony.

The relocation is what seems to have changed everything. When the researchers moved Teré’s family, called the Amigos colony, to a new vivarium, Teré stopped reproducing for almost a year. After that pause, two daughters—siblings from the 2019 litter—began reproducing sequentially. One of them, Arwen, ended up taking over as the sole baby-making queen at the end of 2025. Misryoum analysis indicates that this sequence supports the researchers’ claim that peaceful succession is possible even in one of the most eusocial (and frequently described as most bloody) mammals.

The study, published today in Science Advances, is not arguing that violence is fake or that it never happens. More like… the system has options, and those options might depend on circumstances the colony experiences. Researchers have focused for years on the “queen is dead” trigger, and in this case the trigger looked different enough to keep things from tipping into open conflict. Whether the same calm transition would happen in the wild, or under other kinds of stress, is still the kind of question you can feel hanging there—unfinished, like you turn off the recorder and realize you didn’t capture the strangest part.

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