Y: Try some of this wasabi, Don.

D: I’ll pass. I prefer to eat my sushi without my mouth burning, thanks.

Y. Understandable. Wasabi can be pretty intense… unless you’re a highveld mole-rat.

D: Is the highveld mole-rat related to the famous naked mole rat?

Y: It is. And naked mole-rats are also resistant to certain kinds of pain, like the burning sensation caused by acid and capsaicin, the compound that gives chili peppers their heat. But they felt the painful effects of a substance called allyl isothiocyanate, which is what gives wasabi its burn. The only species of mole-rat resistant to the substance turned out to be the highveld mole-rat. Interestingly, of the different species of mole-rats tested in the study that showed a lack of pain to certain substances, there was little obvious pattern when looking at how the species are related to each other, which suggests that evolving in different environments has led to different adaptations.

D: Being less sensitive to pain sounds great, but what makes it so useful for mole-rats?

Y: For one, roots are a big part of their diets, and roots often have pain-causing substances like allyl isothiocyanate. It also lets mole-rats populate new habitats. Highveld mole-rats are insensitive to the painful bites of the Natal droptail ant, for example, which lets them live alongside them; otherwise, they’d probably steer clear of their territory.

D: Plus, it can eat all the wasabi it wants.

Y: And for us humans, studying pain resistance in mole-rats can help scientists develop better pain-relieving drugs.

D: So we can eat all the wasabi we want?

Y: That’s one use, I suppose, though I think there would be better ones.