Social touch shapes communication and animal recognition in naked mole-rats

The East African naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber) lives in cooperative subterranean colonies and displays a capacity to recognize social novelty, rank, and identity. The sensory cues used for social recognition remain poorly understood, especially because many of their senses are either lost or greatly reduced in comparison to other mammals. Here, we found that naked mole-rats actively touch faces 100% of the time they encounter one another in a tunnel test, followed by milliseconds speed determination of the rank of the other animal. Even in an open arena, naked mole-rats engage in face-to-face touch hundreds of times in a 10-minute social pairing and colonies do so tens of thousands of times over a 24-hour period in their home environment. To demonstrate the prominence of face touch at a molecular level, we show that social housing conditions lead to widespread activation of mechanosensory ion channels, including Piezo2, in neurons that innervate the face, but not the body. Lastly, to determine the ethological relevance of face touch, we reduced its capacity with facial whisker trimming and revealed an apparent inability for animals to recognize colony members. Together, these findings uncover face touch as a prominent social behavior in naked mole-rats that is intimately linked to social recognition.