Grant's golden mole has no functional eyes and no external ears, and it lives in dune sand too loose to hold a tunnel. It rarely builds lasting burrows, swimming through the sand instead, surfacing to travel and diving again. Its middle ear carries a greatly enlarged malleus, and the animal appears to detect low-frequency ground vibration by inertial bone conduction rather than by airborne hearing.
The practical use is navigation. While foraging it alternates between moving over the surface, dipping its head into the sand to sense vibration, and swimming below. Grass hummocks scattered across the dunes shake in the wind, and termites, which make up most of the diet, concentrate beneath them. Field tracking has shown moles moving between widely spaced hummocks more directly than random search would produce.
The animal's name is a double misnomer. Golden moles are not moles and are not close relatives of them; they sit in Afrotheria with tenrecs, elephants and aardvarks. The metallic sheen of the fur, not the colour gold, gives the name.