Where to start with the naked mole rat? Four inches long, hairless, pale, wrinkled, and spindly-legged, it lives in vast underground colonies in Africa, like a termite, and is more closely related to porcupines and guinea pigs than to moles or rats. It is the world’s only eusocial mammal, with hundreds of sterile workers serving a single, constantly pregnant queen. Virtually blind, it digs networks of tunnels using its four protruding incisors, which it can move individually, like chopsticks. It can run as quickly backward as forward. To aid its digestion, it eats its own feces. The naked mole rat can’t regulate its body temperature, as other mammals can, but it is immune to most forms of pain, doesn’t get cancer, and can live for thirty years, nine times longer than other rodents of similar size. Last month, scientists reported that naked mole rats can go without oxygen for as long as eighteen minutes—conditions that would kill a mouse in forty-five seconds and most humans twice over. They manage this by switching their metabolism to run on fructose instead of glucose, as no other animal can.

Also, naked mole rats look ridiculous. When they were first discovered, in 1843, they were mistaken for sickly specimens of a different species. They have been likened to sabre-toothed sausages, miniature walruses, and, not infrequently, phalluses on legs. If you Google the phrase “penis with teeth”—which, don’t—half of the first few pages of results will relate to naked mole rats.

For many of these reasons, and maybe especially the last one, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, a charitable organization, has chosen the naked mole rat as the mascot for its latest public-service campaign, aimed at teen-age boys. Last week, on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, it began circulating a ninety-second video in which a cheery spokesman in a tweed jacket strolls among typical adolescent males—befuddled, distracted, combing wispy mustaches, sticking smartphones down their pants—and explains that sending compromising photos of oneself can lead to blackmail. “It’s extortion, but with ‘sex’ at the beginning,” he says, brightly. “Sextortion!” Then, from an auditorium stage, he shows an audience of wide-eyed boys a large photo of a naked mole rat. Why not send that instead? “Long, veiny, and fleshy, the naked mole rat—you can call it Willy—looks a lot like that picture you were just about to send, except it’s got two beady little eyes and four sharp teeth at the tip.” The P.S.A. ends with a slogan: “Don’t get sextorted, send a naked mole rat.”

Starting this week, the video began appearing more widely, on Viceland, Facebook, FX, TechTV, and other male-oriented outlets. The campaign’s Web site also features downloadable memes—GIFs of naked mole rats with captions such as “You want nudes?” and “hey girl”—as well as T-shirts, iPhone cases, and other items, all emblazoned with naked mole rats, for sale. The site explains a little about the animal, adding, “it may be able to add protecting Canadian teens to its list of capabilities.” Lianna McDonald, the center’s executive director, conceded that the campaign treads a fine line in using humor to address so serious a topic. “Being steeped in child protection, it was a really big step for us to take,” she told me. “It’s brazen. But when you’re dealing with young people, you have to think creatively. If we’re not getting their attention, we’re not doing our job.”

COURTESY CANADIAN CENTRE FOR CHILD PROTECTION

The targets of sextortion schemes are usually women and girls, but in the past couple of years law-enforcement officials in the United States and Canada have seen a rise in cases targeting teen-age boys. Last November, a thirty-two-year-old man in Minnesota was sentenced to thirty-eight years in prison for extorting more than a hundred and fifty boys, many of them high-school athletes he’d found by searching through yearbooks. In Canada, sextortion cases targeting boys have spiked eighty-nine per cent in the past two years, and the number of calls to the center from worried or traumatized teens has risen from a few a year to fifteen a month. “They’re incredibly distressed,” McDonald said. “It’s very orchestrated, and very frightening. And these are just the kids we’ve found out about. We knew we had to get out in front of it.”

For help, McDonald and her colleagues turned to No Fixed Address, a Toronto-based ad agency that previously worked with them on Project Arachnid, an automated crawler designed to reduce the incidence of online material involving child abuse. “When we got the brief and started to unpack the brains of fourteen-, fifteen-, sixteen-year-olds, we thought, Humor is one of the only ways to go,” Dave Lafond, the agency’s co-founder and president, said. “They don’t want to be talked to or talked at. At the end of the day, it’s a sex-ed video.” Two of his junior employees—Andrew Rizzi, a copywriter, and Daniela Angelucci, an art director—chose the mascot. “We were going through Google, looking for GIFs and memes under the search term ‘sending nudes,’ and a photo of a naked mole rat came up,” Angelucci said. “We thought, Hey, actually, there might be something to it.” Teen-agers, Rizzi told me, have “become desensitized to the type of P.S.A. that uses fear to get its point across,” so they presented the campaign as a practical tool kit. “Something interactive,” Angelucci said. “Something they could download and use.”

“As Canadians, it’s not an animal we’re very familiar with,” Lafond said. He thought that, maybe at some level, struggling teens could identify with the creature. “In the process, we discovered that the naked mole rat feels no pain. He’s cold-blooded. He can hold his breath for eighteen minutes.” Also, he said, there’s “the obvious parallel.”

Unlike other spokesanimals—Smokey Bear, the Geico gecko, the Aflac duck—the naked mole rat never speaks or addresses the viewer or behaves in any way artificial to its true nature. That was quite intentional; the agency and the center had many discussions about how to hew to a creative line that was witty yet tasteful, Lafond said. They acquired footage from National Geographic but were mindful not to camp it up. “When we took him out of his habitat, it felt like we were manipulating him,” Lafond said. “We kept it pretty descriptive, pretty straightforward: this is the naked mole rat, this is where the naked mole rat lives, this is what he does.” A couple of the memes they proposed “accidentally crossed the line”—like an image of a naked mole rat giving the finger—and those were set aside. Now the most suggestive meme is a wordless one that shows only the front half of a naked mole rat quickly emerging into the frame and retreating again.