Margen
The naked mole-rat is a wrinkled, near-blind rodent that lives underground, in crowded tunnels in East Africa. Air is scarce down there, and its body has adapted to oxygen levels that would knock us out.
When oxygen disappears entirely, it does something never seen in any other mammal: it changes fuel. Instead of burning glucose, it switches to fructose through a pathway similar to that of plants, which needs no oxygen. That way it can hold out for almost eighteen minutes with no air at all and wake up as if nothing had happened.
As if that weren't enough, it lives up to thirty years, remarkable for its size, and hardly ever develops cancer. An ugly little creature that endures what almost no vertebrate can, and that has scientists glued to it to understand ageing.