If you think you take a lot of crap from your boss, you’ve got nothing on the naked mole-rat. Workers in this society literally eat their queen’s dung in order to prepare themselves to care for her children, a new study suggests.

Naked mole-rats ( Heterocephalus glaber , pictured) live in underground colonies throughout the deserts of East Africa. Apart from a few breeding males, colony members spend their days foraging for tubers, defending against predators, and taking care of the queen’s youngsters. This last behavior has puzzled biologists: In female mammals, child-rearing instincts are typically sparked by a flood of hormones during pregnancy—yet these hormone-producing reproductive organs never develop in the subordinate females in naked mole-rat society. So what kick-starts their maternal urge?

According to a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , the answer could be related to an unsavory aspect of mole-rat behavior: coprophagy, or the eating each other’s poop. The researchers, who first reported their findings 3 years ago at a Society for Neuroscience meeting, analyzed a naked mole-rat colony in a lab. One group of female subordinates dined on the pregnant queen’s dung, whereas another ate poop from a nonpregnant queen. A final group ate feces from a nonpregnant queen that had been garnished with the estrogen hormone estradiol, which has been shown to jump-start maternal behaviors like grooming and nursing.

Subordinates that ate poop either from the pregnant queen or fortified with estradiol turned their heads to tune into recordings of mole-rat pup cries, and had higher levels of estrogen in their poop and urine, than did the other mole rats. That suggests naked mole-rat queens pass along maternal instincts to their subordinates through fecal meals —a strategy that appears to be unique in the animal kingdom.