A colony averages roughly 70 to 80 animals and can exceed 250. Only the queen and one to three breeding males reproduce; the rest are reproductively suppressed non-breeders, a state maintained by the queen's behaviour rather than by sterility. Remove the queen and other females become fertile, which shows the suppression is reversible.
The colony's tunnels are hypoxic and hypercapnic, and the animals are unusually tolerant of both. Laboratory work has shown they can survive periods of extreme oxygen deprivation by switching to fructose-driven anaerobic metabolism, a route otherwise seen mainly in plants. They are also effectively poikilothermic for a mammal, huddling and moving through the burrow to regulate temperature.
A persistent overstatement is that naked mole-rats do not age or cannot get cancer. Their mortality hazard does appear not to rise with age over the studied span, and tumours are rare, but individuals do die, and cancer has been documented in captive animals.