Take your pick of indignities to heap on these lowly rodents. They are ugly enough to make a freight train take a dirt road; so homely they have to sneak up on a bowl of water to drink from it; hideous enough to haunt a nine-room house from the front porch.

Go ahead, say it, it's been said before. But to the animal keepers at Zoo Atlanta, these hairless specimens of Heterocephalus glaber are special, wrinkles and all. They are mole rats, scheduled to debut April 1.

RICH ADDICKS/AJC (ENLARGE)

A colony of naked mole rats, presently being kept in quarantine at Zoo Atlanta, will soon have a new home and exhibit, which opens April 1.

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Seventeen naked mole rats, each vying to be the homeliest, are living in a temporary enclosure at the zoo, where they've been quarantined since December. The zoo has built a habitat for the creatures about the size of a two-car garage not far from the World of Reptiles. There, they should create a colony where everyone serves the queen.

That's the way nature intended, said Sam Rivera, an associate veterinarian who's been keeping a close eye on the beady-eyed wigglers since they arrived from the Houston Zoo. Like bees or ants, mole rats create a society in which one female is in charge of producing offspring. Everyone else pretty much does what she says — or squeaks, if you prefer.

"They're very structured as to their social structures," said Rivera.

Translated: Some rats do the work, others stand guard, and a few perform stud duties on the queen. It's her call.

"There are only a few, select males she'll breed with," said Rivera.

Looks apparently have nothing to do with who gets the gets the girl and who gets to guard. Mole rats, native to Africa, are nearly blind. They spend their lives tunneling in the dark. Each mole rat, slightly larger than a well-fed mouse, has white incisors that protrude from upper and lower jaws; they look like the tips of toothpicks, gleaming and pointed, and are superb digging tools.

Now, the mole rats are in a sort of limbo. Two females have been duking it out for the privilege of becoming queen. Their fights had became so pitched that zoo officials recently separated the two until they move into the exhibit. One would-be queen is in the enclosure with about a dozen other mole rats. The other is in an empty aquarium littered with wood chips. With her are a couple of males to keep her company.

In the wild, mole rats dine on tuber roots as they tunnel along. At the zoo, they have been feasting on an array of vegetables. They can easily live for more than two decades. A healthy queen mole rat, who grows extra vertebrae and is bigger than her peers, can produce more than 20 offspring at a time.

On a recent morning, the mole rats swarmed about as if something was chasing them. With their nearly hairless bodies and squinty eyes, they resembled newborn kittens in a race. Some darted through a see-through plastic pipe about the circumference of a softball, banging into each other, then wrestling briefly before scurrying away. Others burrowed in wood chips, proof they are natural diggers. One walked around with a string bean in its mouth.

In fairness to the mole rats: They are not the only zoo residents whose visage could knock a buzzard off a branch. Warthogs Vern and Shirley face aesthetic challenges. The alligator snapping turtle, with his beaky mouth and angry eyes, looks like a hungry monster. The Komodo dragon may well be a hungry monster.

Does Rivera consider the newcomers as ugly as those other guys? Rivera, showing a flair for diplomacy, shook his head. "I think," he said, "that they're interesting."

You can judge for yourself, starting next week.