Q. Dear Twig: Why don't porcupines stick to things? All those pointy quills and all ...
A. First, the quills ("kwills") on a porcupine mostly point backward. So when a porcupine climbs up a tree, for example, its quills don't aim forward and poke into things by mistake. Like branches, tree trunks or the back ends of bears.
Second, besides pointing backward, the quills also usually lie flat, near the body. This cuts down on the chance of accidents too.
The quills do stick up when a porky feels threatened. Maybe a wolf or a dog tries to bother it. The stuck-up, stuck-out quills serve as protection. Special muscles around each quill pull tight and make the quill stand up.
Third, if the stuck-up, stuck-out quills do get stuck into something, like the nose of a dog or the snout of a wolf, they dislodge — come loose — from the porky very easily. This lets the porcupine get away — not stay stuck — while the predator deals with a snootful of quills.
Prickly,
Twig
P.S. Porcupines can't throw their quills. Nor shoot them. And the quills aren't poisonous.
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Notes:
The quills of the North American porcupine are barbed, hollow, modified hairs. A porcupine has about 30,000 of them.
Scientists call the muscles that make quills stand up "piloerectors," while a special quill-holding skin part called the "spool" lets stuck-up, poked-into-something quills pull loose much more easily than relaxed ones do.
Sources included "A Facilitated Release Mechanism for Quills of the North American Porcupine" by Uldis Roze, Queens College, New York, in Journal of Mammalogy, 2002; and "Smart Weapons" by Roze in Natural History, 2006.
Twig has been vacationing in a place where porcupines live but hasn't, unfortunately, run into any. This column first ran Feb. 15, 2007.
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About This:
"Smart Stuff with Twig Walkingstick" is a weekly feature for children (ages 9+; 4th grade reading level) about science, nature, farming and the environment. Online at http://extension.osu.edu/~news/archive.php?series=science.
Brought to you by your scientific friends at The Ohio State University — specifically, at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) (http://www.oardc.ohio-state.edu) and with Ohio State University Extension (http://extension.osu.edu). OARDC and OSU Extension are the research and outreach arms, respectively, of Ohio State's College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences.
Written by Kurt Knebusch of OARDC and OSU Extension. For details, to ask Twig a question, and/or to receive the column free by mail or e-mail, contact Kurt at CommTech, 1680 Madison Ave., Wooster, OH 44691; knebusch.1@osu.edu; (330) 263-3776.