Mole-rats get fat to have sex.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Aren't they adorable?

Lazy mole rats that get fat to have sex

YOU'RE fat, lazy, and only the prospect of mating can propel you into action. But that's just fine - as long as you're an African mole rat. Your fellow colony members will even toil to support you.

Zoologists studying the Damaraland mole rat (Cryptomys damarensis) in its native southern Africa have discovered that its colonies are split into two distinct castes of worker. One group is hard-working and industrious; the other is fat and rather work-shy.

Damaraland mole rats and naked mole rats are thought to be the only mammal species that live and breed cooperatively, with some colony members devoting their lives to helping others reproduce. To explore their unusual lifestyle, Michael Scantlebury of the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and colleagues in the UK studied the creatures' energy demands and activity levels.

They found that the industrious mole rats performed more than 95 per cent of the total work of the colony. The lazy mole rats built up their fat stores, placing a double burden on the colony - doing virtually no work, but requiring more food (Nature, vol 440, p 795).

Just one thing gets the lazy mole rats going. In the wet season, when the soil is moist and soft, they go into overdrive, digging burrows to help them strike out and reproduce, possibly mating with other colonies or even founding colonies of their own.
(From issue 2546 of New Scientist magazine, 05 April 2006, page 21)

This is an example of a species of mammal that has developed the same sort of social structure that social insects such as bees, ants, and termites do.

[Alferd Packer]

How do you say "The bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin'" in rat?

[Dark Hellion]

How do you say "The bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin'" in rat?

If I remember my Discworld correctly, its something along the line of "Squeek! Squeek Squeek!" But I may need to check the conjugation of the verbs, and make sure my pronouns are defined.

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

"Fat sex is the best kind of sex! There were so many boobs, I couldn't tell who was who!" -Peter Griffin

[defanatic]

How do you say "The bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin'" in rat?

If I remember my Discworld correctly, its something along the line of "Squeek! Squeek Squeek!" But I may need to check the conjugation of the verbs, and make sure my pronouns are defined.

Or perhaps "Squeak!"?

[Ryushikaze]

How do you say "The bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin'" in rat?

If I remember my Discworld correctly, its something along the line of "Squeek! Squeek Squeek!" But I may need to check the conjugation of the verbs, and make sure my pronouns are defined.

Or perhaps "Squeak!"?

Definitely "Squeak! Squeak, Squeek!!". Depending on how fat you are, though, you may expect to hear "SQUEAK" shortly thereafter.

On subject, this isn't entirely surprising, given that there have been periods of human history where fat (well, proportioned and not overtly unhealthy fat) was the height of eroticism.

[Edi]

Interesting. By the way, the molerat is by far the fucking ugliest animal I've ever seen. There was a section on them in one of the Africa documentaries I've seen, and they look goddamn hideous.

Edi