Cape mole-rat facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Cape mole-rat Temporal range: Middle Pleistocene to Recent
Conservation status
Least Concern (IUCN 3.1)
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Order:	Rodentia
Family:	Bathyergidae
Genus:	Georychus Illiger, 1811
Species:	G. capensis
Binomial name
Georychus capensis (Pallas, 1778)
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Synonyms
Mus capensis Pallas, 1778

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The Cape mole-rat (Georychus capensis) is a special animal that lives only in South Africa. It's a type of mole-rat and is the only living species in its group, called Georychus.

What Do They Look Like?

Cape mole-rats look a lot like other African mole-rats. They have bodies shaped like a tube, with short legs and big feet that have tough, leathery bottoms. Their heads are large and round, and their tails are short with only a few hairs.

Like other mole-rats, they don't have outside ears that stick out. Their eyes are very tiny, but they can still see. If they ever leave their tunnels, they can see well enough to turn and show their strong front teeth (called incisors) to scare away anything trying to attack them. Adult Cape mole-rats are about 16 centimeters (6.3 inches) long from head to body, with a 2-centimeter (0.8-inch) tail. They weigh around 180 grams (6.3 ounces).

You can easily tell Cape mole-rats apart from other mole-rat species by their fur color. They have clear white patches around their ears and eyes, and smaller white spots on their nose and sometimes on top of their head. These white patches are why they are called blesmol, which is an Afrikaans word meaning "blaze mole." Most of their fur is a reddish-brown color, with shiny, silvery-white fur on their belly. Their head is darker, sometimes even a dark gray. The hair on their feet is also white.

Unlike some other mole-rats, Cape mole-rats don't have long, stiff hairs called guard hairs. However, they do have slightly longer, stiff hairs around their mouth and feet, and they have short whiskers. Because they don't have guard hairs, their fur feels thick and soft, like wool.

Where Do They Live?

Cape mole-rats live in forests and grassy areas along the coast of the Western Cape and Eastern Cape provinces in South Africa. Some groups have also been found in KwaZulu-Natal, which is east of Lesotho, and in Mpumalanga. Even though there are no official different types (subspecies) of Cape mole-rats, this might be because not much research has been done on them. Some scientists think the mole-rats in KwaZulu-Natal might even be a completely different species. They seem to prefer sandy soil, river mud (alluvium), or clay soils.

Scientists have found fossils of Cape mole-rats from a time called the middle Pleistocene in a place called Elandsfontein in the Western Cape. Fossils that belong to the Georychus group, but not exactly to the living Cape mole-rat species, have been found from an earlier part of the Pleistocene in Swartkrans.

How Do They Behave?

A Cape mole-rat in a defensive posture.

Like other mole-rats, Cape mole-rats almost never go above ground. They spend most of their lives in tunnels they dig underground. Their tunnels are usually between 50 to 130 meters (164 to 427 feet) long, and about 10 centimeters (4 inches) wide.

Unlike most other animals called moles, Cape mole-rats dig with their strong front teeth (incisors). This allows them to dig through much harder ground than most moles can. Their lips are special because they can close behind their front teeth when they open their mouths wide. This stops dirt from getting into their mouths while they dig. Their feet only help by pushing the loose dirt backward.

Cape mole-rats are herbivores, meaning they eat plants. They eat the bulbs, corms, and tubers of plants like Star-of-Bethlehem, Cape tulips, and wood-sorrels. They find this food by digging smaller tunnels to reach plant roots. These tunnels are narrower than their main tunnels and can be as little as 0.5 to 2.5 centimeters (0.2 to 1 inch) below the surface. They might also carry food to deeper storage rooms to save it for later, or when a female is raising her young. They don't need to drink water because they get all the water they need from the food they eat.

When eating bulbs, Cape mole-rats hold the food with their front paws. They chew off the bottom part, then peel away the outer skin with their teeth, starting from the tip and moving down to the base, much like how humans peel a banana. They have a large part of their gut called a caecum. Like rabbits, they are coprophagic, which means they eat their own poop. This helps them get all the nutrients from their food by passing it through their body twice.

Besides storage rooms, the center of their tunnel system has a nest and a separate bathroom area. The tunnels are completely closed off from the surface, but you can see where they've been digging by the dome-shaped mounds of dirt, similar to mole hills. Because the tunnels are closed, there isn't much fresh air inside. It's often low in oxygen and humid, but it protects them from bad weather. The mole-rats sometimes go above ground to find plants or to move to a new area to start their own tunnel systems.

Even though they live almost entirely underground and have very poor eyesight, Cape mole-rats follow a daily rhythm that matches the daylight hours above ground. They are mostly active at night. Unlike some other mole-rat species, they are solitary animals, meaning they live alone. Except when a female is raising her young, only one mole-rat lives in each tunnel system. They are very aggressive towards other mole-rats of their own kind when it's not mating season. If they meet a rival, they stand stiffly with their head back and jaws open, chattering their teeth and sometimes jumping towards the other mole-rat. Because their tunnel systems can be as close as 2 meters (6.6 feet) to each other, they warn away rivals by making special vibrations in the ground (seismic signals) that are different for males and females.

Cape mole-rats get worried if they sense a break in their tunnel system. They move carefully towards the break and make strange 'pumping' movements with their back legs, but no one knows why. Predators that might enter their tunnels to eat Cape mole-rats include mole snakes and Cape cobras. They are especially in danger when they travel above ground, where they can be caught by jackals, mongooses, owls, and grey herons.

Reproduction and Life Cycle

During the summer mating season, both male and female mole-rats drum on the sides of their tunnels with their back feet. This drumming is a different signal than when they warn off other mole-rats at other times of the year. The drumming is loud enough that you can hear it above ground from up to 10 meters (33 feet) away. Once a male finds a partner, they mate quickly, with short breaks for grooming each other.

Pregnancy lasts 44 to 48 days. A litter of three to ten young are born between August and December. The babies are born without hair and are blind. They weigh only 5 to 12 grams (0.18 to 0.42 ounces) and are 3 to 4 centimeters (1.2 to 1.6 inches) long. Their fur starts to grow on day seven, and their eyes open on day nine. The young grow very quickly and start eating solid food around day seventeen. They are fully weaned (stop drinking milk) at four weeks old. By five weeks, the brothers and sisters start to fight with each other, and they leave to dig their own tunnels at around seven weeks old.

Cape mole-rats become old enough to have their own babies at eighteen months of age. They can live for up to five years.