African mole-rats possess very remarkable characteristics for aging research. They almost never develop cancer, are largely healthy even in old age, and are extremely long-lived compared to other rodents. Some mole-rat species even age differently depending on their status in the colony: if they are sexually active, they live almost twice as long as their conspecifics. Researchers at the Leibniz Institute on Aging – Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI) in Jena and the University of Duisburg-Essen have investigated which status-specific changes underlie this life-extending phenomenon. They found that mole-rats workers of the genus Fukomys are under constant stress and therefore age prematurely.