Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean

Barbs. Grunts. Bone caves. Dogs who got too close. We got porcupines, folks. Dr. Tim Bean of Cal Poly is as charming an ologist you can get, fielding questions about porcupine squeaks, stanks, cartoonish noses, and some romantic gestures that will leave you wanting to bleach your brain. We also cover counting quills, male models, flim-flam about quill removal, how to spot a porcupine in the wild, how to gently detain one for research, and so much more. An absolute instant classic.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

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• 0:45Alie Ward?

  Unlike other services, there's no subscription required, so you can order whenever you want without a huge commitment. Plus, you get free shipping and returns. Get started today at StitchFix.com. That's StitchFix.com. This podcast is brought to you by Aura. Your body has a lot going on. Sleep, stress, recovery. You would be surprised how connected it all is. Aura Ring tracks more than 50 metrics from your finger, and the Aura app brings that information together to help you see patterns across your sleep and stress, activity, and more, so you can start connecting the dots and figure out what works for you. Learn more at AuraRing.com. Wear your best life with Aura.

• 1:32Alie Ward?

  Oh, hey, it's yesterday's medication in your jeans pocket. Oops, Ali Ward. Let's stab ourselves with information from a porcupine's business end. We have a good one. What a chat. I remember getting off this interview and being like, this is why I make the show. You're in for a treat. Okay, so we've got an associate professor from San Luis Obispo's California Polytechnic State University, Cal Poly, who teaches courses like Introduction to Wildlife Conservation and Administration. They studied ecology, evolution, and environmental biology at Columbia University. They headed to UC Berkeley for a master's and PhD in environmental science, policy, and management. Bonus, they specialize in Rodents? What does that have to do with porcupines? Everything. Porcupines are rodents. What?

• 2:15Alie Ward?

  Yep, big, beautiful, barbed, rat-like creatures, and we love them. Thank you also to Sarah Listener Berman, to listener Sarah Berman, who suggested this ologist singing their praises of their porcupine enthusiasm. So we're going to get to it in a sec, but first, thank you so much to everyone who sends in questions, audio ones as well. You can submit them at patreon.com/ologies. Thanks to everyone wearing Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. And thanks to everyone who leaves reviews for the show, which helps us so much. Like this one from NJ Roadrunner, who wrote, "If science could embody itself as a warm hug, this show would be it." Also want to shout out Snakes Rule, who left the review, "I'm 11 years old and I love this podcast." No, I'm not kidding. No, I do not listen to Smologies. No, I do not listen to the bleeped ones.

• 2:59Alie Ward?

  Yes, I actually understand it. You keep doing you, Ally. Snakes Rule, I'm a fan of you and of snakes. Okay, for those who are looking, though, for kid-safe episodes, just a reminder that we have Smologies. It's available wherever you subscribe to podcasts. It's a spinoff show. You can look for the green cover art. Okay, porcupines. So porcupines, news to me, get their name from the Latin for thorn pig. But the ology for this, let's just say erythrosinology, which comes from the Greek for irritating. There's two major groups of porcupines. We're going to include both in this episode, but mostly, we're focusing on the genus erythrosin. Is that cool? Okay, great. So get suited up for a thrilling array of weird stories involving barbs, grunts, squeaks, cartoonish noses,

• 3:44Alie Ward?

  romantic gestures that will leave you wanting to bleach your brain, counting quills, male models, flim-flam about quill removal, how to spot a porcupine in the wild, and so much more with professor ecologist and erythrosinologist Dr. Tim Bean.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Tim Bean, he/him?

• 4:19Alie Ward?

  Do you get called Jim Bean a lot?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Jim Beam, yeah. And then sometimes like Kim for some reason for to-go orders. Confusing.

• 4:27Alie Ward?

  Tim Kim Jim Beam?

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, as long as it's not Mr. Bean, I'm fine.

• 4:33Alie Ward?

  Do people ever call you Dr. Porcupine?

• 4:35Speaker 01

  No.

• 4:37Alie Ward?

  You're like, that's a really good Marvel character. Just like shooting quills out of your wrists at people.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we'll get to that, right? Like, yeah.

• 4:49Alie Ward?

  Okay, actually, porcupines, I feel like underneath their quills, they gotta be the cuddliest little babies.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's what makes them so compelling is like, they are dopey and lovable and sweet and almost apologetic about the fact that they're unhuggable.

• 5:11Alie Ward?

  If you wanted to be in some sort of a close relationship with them, I feel like they would have avoidant attachment issues.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  When I started this research, there I was like, literally to the point where I was Googling, how do you pick up a porcupine? And there is, there's a self-help book called How to Hug a Porcupine, Easy Ways to Love the Difficult People in Your Life.

• 5:38Alie Ward?

  Is there an easy way to handle a porcupine? If you're a porcupine researcher, what kind of gloves are you working with?

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, welding gloves, like thick, heavy leather gloves is generally the recommendation. There's a spot under their tail that doesn't have any quills and their tail is super strong. It's almost like a fifth appendage that they use to help climb. And so that's generally how people try to pick them up is like, get your hand under the tail and grab them there and then you can kind of pick them up. But at that point, like you got to anesthetize them if you're really going to handle them and and measure them and and put a collar on and all that stuff.

• 6:12Alie Ward?

  By under the tail, is that their junk necessarily? Or is that in a different spot?

• 6:16Speaker 01

  No, their junk is hidden away most of the time. So it's actually like retracted into the body, which makes it easier to climb, right? Like, they're right up against the tree when they're climbing.

• 6:26Alie Ward?

  Must I remind us of the 2024 Paris pole multer, whose victory was thwarted by his own generous nethers? A self betrayal of Olympic proportions. But Tim says that a porcupine's tail, which is about the size of a mitten, is covered in quills on the top. But on the flip side, it's just a haven of only guard hairs. And in the colder months, some soft, fuzzy fur. Are quills types of hairs? Or are they modified scales? I mean, I'm going to get right into it because I'm like, what the fuck is going on?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, they are. They're modified hairs. So they're made of keratin. And you sort of look at the evolutionary lineage of porcupines. And there's like these species called spiny rats that have spines that are closely related. And then you can kind of see like other porcupines have less evolved quills. And then you've got the North American porcupines that have these really highly modified quills that are really awful if you get them in you.

• 7:23Alie Ward?

  Really? What are they like?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  So North American porcupine quills have backwards facing barbs. The quill itself is sharp. It gets in you. And then there are these backward facing barbs that make it very difficult and painful to pull back out. And then they also, the backward facing barb means that if you don't pull it out, the quill will start to work its way into you further and further, or your dog. And then that becomes a real problem if it actually gets in your body and you got to go in and get it out.

• 7:49Alie Ward?

  So at the very tip of an erythozontidae, or North American porcupine's quills, are hundreds upon hundreds of tiny barbs. And for more on those, if you must, you can see the 2012 paper, "Microstructured barbs on the North American porcupine quill enable easy tissue penetration and difficult removal." There you go. Now, the genus Hystrix, or African porcupines, sometimes called Old World porcupines, no barbs, in case you have a choice of which type of porcupine can shank you. Oof. Okay, you've mentioned other porcupines and you mentioned North American porcupines. I know you study North American ones. But are there Eurasian porcupines? Are there South American porcupines? Are there? African porcupines.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, all of those. And it's really confusing. So there's two families, capital F, of porcupines. There's the Hystricidae, which are the African Eurasian porcupines. And there's like 11 species of those. And then totally separately is the family of North and South American porcupines, Erythizontidae, where there's about 20 species of those. And it's, man, I've been like looking the past week or two. Because I always tell people that those two families, the like African and Eurasian porcupines and the North and South Americans evolved separately. And that they evolved quills independently from each other. And like, nobody seems to want to really go on record and say whether that's true or not,

• 9:17Speaker 01

  or whether the like, you know, so they separated like 10 to 20 million years ago. And I think we just don't really know whether that ancient rodent ancestor of the two groups had some form of quill, and then they split and they continue to have quills, or if they evolved independently. But yeah, so around the world, there's like 30 species of porcupines. But they're very different. The family of African and Eurasian porcupines are much bigger. They're ground dwelling. The quills are way longer. They're like a foot long. And I think they're more aggressive. Like a lot of the videos of, you know, porcupine like attacking a leopard, those are generally African porcupines, Eurasian porcupines.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  And then the North and South American porcupines are more arboreal. They spend a lot of time in trees, eating leaves, much shorter quills.

• 10:08Alie Ward?

  So we got about 30 species of porcupine. And the African and North American ones are distantly related. And then we got the South American ones with a big bulbous pink nose and a tail like a monkey. African porcupines can weigh up to 66 pounds or 30 kilos. And they're mostly veggie eaters who dig for roots and bulbs. And they eat people's tuber crops, or they forage for fruits or bark. Sometimes an African porcupine will eat a dead body if it finds one, like rote kill. And sometimes they hoard a bunch of bones to Chew on in their den if they need minerals. What's more goth? Thousands of spikes, striking fear into the hearts of your foes and gnawing on bones in your underground cave.

• 10:52Alie Ward?

  Not even bats can compete with that. I did not know they went so hard. I didn't know there were so many branches of porcupine. Speaking of branches. Do you think that the adaptations needed to be a ground dweller versus a tree dweller are different in terms of if you're in the ground? More things are going to come and try and eat you. But if you're in the trees, you're going to encounter fewer jackals and stuff?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's possible. That definitely is possible. Right? Like the defense stuff is much more important if you're on the ground and you're out, you know, digging around for roots and stuff. The other part of it is, at least for North American porcupines, they fall out of trees a lot.

• 11:31Alie Ward?

  Oh, baby.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  So they're not super coordinated and they'll quill themselves. And so.

• 11:37Alie Ward?

  No.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  The, yeah. And so I think there's probably some benefit to having shorter quills in that case. Like instead of breaking a bunch off when you fall on the ground, like having shorter ones that are at least somewhat protected by the outer guard hairs is probably better.

• 11:52Alie Ward?

  Oh, that's so embarrassing.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  It's sad. I mean, so there's this incredible book by Aldis Rose, U L D I S R O Z E, called The North American Porcupine. He's a professor in New York City and he talks about like, he examined porcupine skeletons in museums. And he was saying like, a third of them have broken bones, which has got to be from falling out of trees.

• 12:20Alie Ward?

  Oh, my poor baby. Do they have like hollow bird bones or they're just not that good at balance?

• 12:29Speaker 01

  They're just not that good at balance.

• 12:31Alie Ward?

  Imagine wearing a headpiece that is like a fan made of barbed spears and it is your burden in life to bear. Just trying to slink between branches to try to eat a salad made out of trees. You're like weaving through an agility course, dressed like Rihanna at the Met Gala, but if diamonds were needles.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  The like best morsels are probably out at the end of the branches. And so I think they're probably taking some risks going out on some thin limbs that they probably shouldn't be.

• 13:01Alie Ward?

  I'm never complaining again, ever. When the quills come out in a predator, I always wondered, do they just kind of pop out easily like a Lego snapping off? Or is it like painful, like getting, um, getting your mustache waxed?

• 13:17Speaker 01

  For the porcupine, they have this special mechanism where like they're not just going to come out day to day. You actually have to push into the skin. So like something pushes on the top of the quill and then that like releases the muscle that's holding it in and then they come out.

• 13:35Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  So it is sort of like waxing your, your mustache or legs or whatever. If you just pull the quill out, that would probably be super painful. But if they take their tail and like swack a dog's face, that like engages this release mechanism that I think probably does not hurt.

• 13:53Alie Ward?

  The porcupines at least. The dog would like to have a word. Oh God. How did you get into porcupines of all things? I know that you work on a few different.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:03Alie Ward?

  Animals, kangaroo rats.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:05Alie Ward?

  But how did your path lead you down this spiny road?

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the practical answer is when I was applying for my first faculty job at Humboldt State, everybody's asking me like, what are you going to study when you get up here? And I'm giving all these like lame, half-assed answers because I just don't ever want to think about researching again. And then finally, the final night, second night, we go out to dinner with like all the other faculty in the department and they ask again, like, what are you going to study if you get up here? And I just, it popped into my head. I had seen this talk a couple of years ago by this guy, Rick Schweitzer, who does a lot of conservation work in the Sierras and had done his graduate work on, on porcupines in Nevada. And he was saying, we don't see porcupines anymore. Like they're not where they used to be in the Sierras. And so I just blurted out like, I don't know, maybe porcupines?

• 14:54Speaker 01

  And that clicked, like everyone around the table was like, oh, that's such a great idea. Like porcupines would be amazing. The students could go out, they can do these behavioral observations. It's such a cool species. And all the tribes in the area, like the Hoopa and Uroch and the Karuk have all been asking like, where are the porcupines? We used to have porcupines here and we can't find them anymore. So that was sort of, I don't know if it got me the job, but it was just sort of this like light bulb moment. And so yeah, started research up there when I got the job.

• 15:21Alie Ward?

  Do you think that there was something in you that made you say it because everyone knows that porcupines are cool?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, they are. They're super cool. And they're sort of, they're kind of like, you know, we talk about like a comic's comic or a writer's writer. Like, I think porcupines are kind of, I think, the species that a lot of ecologists really like, but they're sort of underappreciated and understudied. You know, everybody loves porcupines.

• 15:51Alie Ward?

  And also, the thrill of the unapproachability of them.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:57Alie Ward?

  So porcupines are your favorite ecologist's favorite ecology. And I have seen many photos and videos of porcupines willingly because they live in my heart. And some of them have faces like a Japanese cartoon with a tiny nose that's sometimes brown and fuzzy. They got little teensy fidgeting hands. Other porcupines have a nose that looks like an oversized pink marshmallow. What's going on with their nose? Why so big and cute?

• 16:24Speaker 01

  So they need to be able to smell really well. And some of the noses of like porcupine accounts on social media, I think some of those are South American species, where they have this like big bald nose that's kind of sticking out. North American porcupines also have really big noses, but they're furred. But they just need to have a really good sense of smell. I mean, they're folivores. Most of what they eat is leaves. And so they need to be able to smell where the good leaves are and where the other porcupines are. So yeah, highly evolved nose to for scent.

• 16:59Alie Ward?

  Is it soft? It looks like a big pencil eraser.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:03Alie Ward?

  And I want, I want to touch it.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  That's exactly what it feels like.

• 17:06Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:09Alie Ward?

  Want to touch it. I want to touch the marshmallow nosy. What in your job necessitates getting to, common word boop, but get to touch the nose of a porcupine? Like, are they anesthetized and you have to make sure their nose is a certain temperature? Or is it purely just a perk of the job?

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, the second one. So a lot of the research we were doing was like studying their ecology in this coastal dune forest in Northern California. And the best way to do that is to track them. So we would catch them, anesthetize them, and get a radio collar on them and kind of, you know, just measure them for sex and reproductive status and weight and. Ectoparasites and stuff like that. And while they're sleeping, you know, you get to look at them and feel their nose and, and see what the bottom of their feet look like and stuff like that.

• 17:57Alie Ward?

  How big we talking when it comes to porcupines in general?

• 18:00Speaker 01

  The North American porcupines are like, it's really variable. It's interesting. Like northeastern, like New England porcupines, I think are a little bit smaller. Alaskan porcupines can get up to about 20 or 30 pounds.

• 18:13Alie Ward?

  20 to 30 pounds is like the size of a corgi, but a corgi that's been bred with a sea urchin.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  They're pretty big. I mean, it's like, the ones that we have in Northern California, like, it definitely takes two arms to, to lift a, a large adult porcupine.

• 18:28Alie Ward?

  And two gloved arms.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, fleece and jacket and, and anything else that you can use to protect yourself.

• 18:36Alie Ward?

  How many times do you think you've been barbed?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Not that many. So, um, it turns out dogs are just really stupid.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Like, it's really hard to get quilled, especially when they're anesthetized. Like, like I said, you do have to like, push it in to engage the release. And so when you're handling them and turning them over to examine the underside and stuff, like, you'll definitely get quills that kind of just come out and stick in your shirt. But to get truly quilled, it happened a few times to my students. I, I never got, like, one really deeply embedded in my skin.

• 19:10Alie Ward?

  I did watch one YouTube video of Aldous Rose, another porcupine legend, and his capture method is to cover them with an old red igloo beer cooler, which slides shut. And then from there, he can sedate them and then take them out and take measurements for like 20 or so minutes and then release them on their merry way. Now, what if you get porcupined and you are a porcupine? They have little paws that are good at grasping and they just got to do their best to reach the ones embedded by their enemies. It's a risky life, but they are armed. What kind of students do you, you have that are drawn to this field?

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Um, all kinds. That's a really interesting question. I think the stereotype of wildlife ecologists is generally people Who would rather be around animals than other people? And so I guess that goes sort of doubly for people who want to be around a quilled animal. But yeah, all that, you know, it's, it's a mix of undergraduates and master's students and they've all been just incredible. I mean, like so excited to work with the species and so curious. And the porcupines we were studying just seemed to elicit this like really incredible curiosity about the species and the place they were living. You know, I would go and visit and go up like during the summers, we were doing the research and they would be back at the field house. And like, they would just not stop talking about porcupines.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  They're like, I mean, dinner, like, let's talk about this porcupine we saw today, like after dinner, like, let's think about this other thing that we haven't talked about. It's like, you guys need to take a break from thinking about porcupines.

• 20:44Alie Ward?

  I can't stop. Do you know that I just realized right now that a porcupine actually inspired this entire podcast to exist? And I have not thought about it until right now.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Is that true?

• 20:53Alie Ward?

  Yes, there was a guest named Phil Torres, who's amazing. And he's on, now he's on expedition unknown on discovery, but he studied butterflies in the jungle. But he was a friend before I started this podcast and he once told the story about how he was studying butterflies in the jungles of Peru. And he's also hunky to the point where it's comical. And he's married to like a, a absolutely beautiful Norwegian model. And they're also incredibly nice, which is infuriating.

• 21:25Alie Ward?

  Maddening because they're good people. But to make his way through Cornell, he modeled for Abercrombie. You're just like, fuck you, Phil. And we love him. Anyway, he was talking about once he was in the jungles of Peru and he had to chase a porcupine out of his hut with his acoustic guitar.

• 21:46Alie Ward?

  You're like, like gently nudged out. But I was like, if these are the type of stories that field biologists have, I need to hear more of them. Cause the idea of like a shirtless Abercrombie model having to scoot a porcupine out of a hut with an acoustic guitar was like, those are the stories that need to be heard.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  That was like, to follow up on that, like, that also for me, it was when I was like 20, I was camping with my sister and some friends on the Appalachian Trail. We were sleeping in this lean-to, and all night, there was this bizarre sound coming from underneath the lean-to, like, nobody slept. We were afraid to look to see what it was, and we just could not figure out what it was. And then like, years later, she called me, and she was like, I was just watching this nature documentary, and it was porcupines having sex.

• 22:36Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  That's the noise that we heard all night long. So, yeah, I think like, that's another appeal of porcupines is like, I just think everybody, especially ecologists who have been in the field for a long time, just have this sort of like, they have a story or curiosity or a question that they maybe never got around to researching, but yeah, everybody's got one.

• 22:58Alie Ward?

  Well, all night long, was it like their anniversary, or was there an orgy?

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Their reproductive system is weird, so I can walk you through it.

• 23:10Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  So, female porcupines are either pregnant or lactating 11 months out of the year.

• 23:18Alie Ward?

  Oh, God.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  They have like, for their body size, one of the longest pregnancy periods of any mammal. So they're pregnant for about seven months, and then lactating for four months, and then they have a month off, and then do it all over again.

• 23:29Alie Ward?

  11 months out of the year. Preggers are nursing. They get one month off. Give these ladies a break, Mother Nature. Why do you hate them? Now, an elderly porcupine would be like 10 years old, but usually they only live to around five in the wild. Now, the upside of that short life is you start early. You're horny, you're ready to reproduce at 18 months old. But those uber maternal lady porcupines, though?

• 23:55Speaker 01

  But they're only in estrus for like 12 hours every year.

• 23:59Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  So, what happens is, they send out some pheromones in their, or some kind of olfactory signal in their urine to say, I'm about to go into estrus, like, if there's any males around. And so that, again, is where the big nose comes in, as I think males who are a couple miles away can smell that.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Hello ladies.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  So the males start congregating and then there's a period of competition where, you know, generally like the largest, I think, like one of the older males generally dominates and wins access to the female. Other males, you know, go away and then the male who wins pees on the female.

• 24:38Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Which, which is documented in Marty Stelfer's Wild America episode, The Prickly Porcupine. You can see it for yourself if you really want to.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  The young male catches the scent given off by a female.

• 24:53Speaker 03

  The aroma of her vaginal mucus, mixed with urine, tells him that she's in estrus.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  For his grand finale, the male anoints his intended in a shower of urine.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  Witnesses to this bizarre ritual claim that powerful bursts may travel over six feet.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Which is thought to like stimulate estrus, like to actually happen.

• 25:20Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  And then copulation takes about one to five minutes and then they're doing it for about eight hours and then they go their separate ways for another year.

• 25:31Alie Ward?

  Wait, if copulation takes one to five minutes and they're doing it for eight hours, is there a refractory period?

• 25:36Speaker 01

  I imagine so, yeah. So they'll do it and then take a couple of minutes off for an hour off and then get back to it.

• 25:43Alie Ward?

  Wow. Usually the same dominant male and then all the other ones who made the commute are just like, well, I guess, bye.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, better luck next year.

• 25:54Alie Ward?

  What about their locomotion? Because if they have a 12 hour window to make it a couple of miles to maybe get a chance with a lady, are they just booking ass? How are they getting there?

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Well, I think that's what the peeing on the female does is like, is she goes into this sort of pre-estrus period that's like, I'm almost ready and then it's going to take a while for the males to get over here. They are pretty slow. They, yeah, they're slow. It's going to take them a while to get there and figure out who's going to be the one with access. So I think that's sort of the function of the peeing on the female is like, once all that's sorted out, now it's time to trigger the actual estrus period.

• 26:34Alie Ward?

  So she like sends out a text. She sends out a group text or tweet and then she waits for them to Uber their little asses over.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Anybody up?

• 26:43Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Well, is it, how do they, with all of the quills?

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:50Alie Ward?

  Are they just missionary style? How are they doing that?

• 26:54Speaker 01

  It's the, Rose delicately puts it, the typical mammal position.

• 26:59Alie Ward?

  Of course.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Like, the way dogs do it. So she lifts her tail, which again, the bottom of it doesn't have any quills on it. And then the male gets behind her and the bottom of their stomach doesn't have quills on it either. So it's sort of like quill-less area to quill-less area. And then he, yep, enters from behind.

• 27:16Alie Ward?

  So remember, the bottom of her tail is like a soft, quill-less landing strip that she lays down on her own back for his little tender, quill-less belly. And he doesn't get quilled?

• 27:29Speaker 01

  You know, I'm sure it happens.

• 27:32Alie Ward?

  Yeah, that's awkward, but for the most part, the muscles that would sort of like boyeoing them are not going to be activated.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 27:42Alie Ward?

  Okay, that makes sense evolutionarily, right? Because that would really be a conflict of interest.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yep, and that's probably partly why they don't have quills on the base of their tail and on their stomach as well. The other interesting evolutionary thing about the quills is they're antibiotic and antibacterial. So like, you know, you would sort of think that from a defense perspective, it would be great if they infected, you know, a mountain lion or a fisher or something that's trying to attack them. But because they quill themselves so much, the thinking as they evolved these antibacterial properties so that they wouldn't infect themselves or their mate.

• 28:17Alie Ward?

  It's like Edward's Scissorhands, but Edward's syringe fingers. And each one comes loaded with just a little doxycycline. No copay. Oh, what a bummer for them. How long are they alive?

• 28:28Speaker 01

  They can be pretty long-lived. So Rose documented one that was like 20 years old. And they can live to 20 or 25 years in captivity.

• 28:36Alie Ward?

  Now, usually we save our patron audio questions for the second half, but who cares? Nothing matters. We're going to break the rules. Let's lose our minds. My mind's already lost. Let's get unhinged. Let's get rebellious with a Patreon question early.

• 28:48Speaker 04

  Hi, this is Erin Ryan from Vancouver. And I grew up in a porcupine area and I just want to know why. I've never seen one. And if that seems unfair to you, thank you.

• 29:01Alie Ward?

  Yeah, Erin, it does. I hate that for you. Now, how do you not go to a zoo to see one? How hard is it to see a porcupine? Are they just up in the trees and good luck?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  If you live in a snowy area, that's kind of the best time to see them because their tracks are so clear. And so finding their tracks is a great way to find one. Otherwise, they create these nip twigs. So they'll sit, you know, sit in a tree and eat leaves all night and they'll like, you know, break a branch off, eat all the leaves and then drop the branch to the ground. So if you know what you're looking for, like a tree with a bunch of branches with leaves stripped off of them, that's probably a good place to look up. Otherwise, yeah, or just like wait for your stupid dog to find one.

• 29:46Alie Ward?

  Does your dog know how to like go sniff them out? Why are dogs getting porcupines so much?

• 29:53Speaker 01

  I just saw a paper that said that was pretty breed specific, like

• 29:57Alie Ward?

  Oh, no.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  German shepherds and rottweilers, those are ones that are more, you know, somebody went through old vet records and said, oh, these are the breeds that are more likely to do it. They stink. So porcupines have this really unique warning odor that smells like nothing I've ever smelled before.

• 30:15Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  And so I think dogs are definitely responding to that.

• 30:18Alie Ward?

  While editing this episode, I spotted a note in the transcript left by lead editor Mercedes Maitland. She just wanted to tell me that her, quote, "now departed family dog, a standard poodle named Bentley, got quilled by the same dead porcupine three times." She continues, "We lived in the country and he would go off and find it in the woods. My parents eventually had to comb the woods," she says, "for the carcass so they could dump it somewhere far, far away. Bentley was otherwise a very smart dog, but I guess that porcupine smell was just too hard to resist. He also got skunked a few times in his six years," she said. "So I guess he was not smart when it came to his nose." Mercedes wanted to tell me that. I wanted to tell you that. Mercedes, that's insane,

• 31:02Alie Ward?

  and I love it. Also, if you're just now realizing that you have a special interest in the musk of large rodents, you can enjoy our recent Castorology episode on beavers, in which we discuss at length how their internal scent sacs made it into your ice cream way back then. Anyway, let's return to that thorn-pig stink. When you say "nothing I've ever smelled before," I understand that then that means that none of us can possibly understand. But would you say it's closer to the skunk, closer to the fragrance of a rose, fruity, musky?

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, the chemical composition supposedly has like components of walnuts and pineapple or coconut or something, but like, you gotta take that and like ferment it in a dead rat for a while to really get it. It's like sweet and musky.

• 31:54Alie Ward?

  As a field ecologist who is looking for porcupines, if you start to smell that on the wind, are you excited?

• 32:02Speaker 01

  I guess to the point where it's like, okay, I'm getting a signal. There's a porcupine hidden in the tree above me somewhere. I think I can smell it. Yeah, great.

• 32:12Alie Ward?

  I looked around to find some other olfactory analogues to porcupine essence, and I saw it suggests a strong cheese mixed with weed and barnyard animals. But the most compelling comparison I read was from a wildlife rehabber on Reddit who described it as "just like human body odor and ripe." So a squeaky, grunting gym bag that can pierce your face. It's thrilling. What is that like when it's spotted? When someone's like, "There it is, there it is." Is that like a kind of routine, or does that make your whole day?

• 32:47Speaker 01

  It definitely makes your day. It's great. I mean, you know, it's like you're walking around in the middle of summer at night in this beautiful dune forest. Like, that's good enough on its own, but you don't really know when you're gonna find the next one, and you're kind of struggling to get as many callers out as quickly as possible. So seeing one is awesome. I mean, that's like, you know, that's true for any wildlife, I think, whenever you're hiking and you're like, "Oh, my God, there's a bobcat on the trail." You're out there by yourself, and then suddenly you're with a porcupine. It's amazing.

• 33:19Alie Ward?

  You're like, our posse just grew by one.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:21Alie Ward?

  Well, you mentioned summer nights. Do they tend to hibernate in the winter? Are they nocturnal? Why is that a good time?

• 33:27Speaker 01

  They don't hibernate. I mean, summer are just for practical reasons. Like, that's when students and I are not in class. But generally, they're nocturnal, and then they sleep in the day. But they're out year round. They'll congregate in dens in colder areas to keep warm. But they're still out in the middle of winter trying to get food.

• 33:46Alie Ward?

  What do you think of Teddy the porcupine?

• 33:49Speaker 05

  This is Teddy Bear, your favorite Zooniversity porcupine. We know Teddy Bear likes corn, but I thought we'd see if Teddy liked

• 33:58Speaker 05

  pumpkins today. What is that, Dad? What is that?

• 34:05Speaker 05

  What is it?

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, Teddy's the best. I mean, what a great ambassador and such a sweetie. And of course, we were all like, when are we going to hear these noises?

• 34:19Alie Ward?

  I know.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Forget the smell. If I can be out here, like, listening for the smacks and the chumps and everything.

• 34:27Alie Ward?

  I was so worried you were gonna say Teddy is, and then like a long pause, complicated. And like, finding out Teddy was like racist or was like illegally poached or something. Just a quick side note. Teddy Bear the porcupine is a rescue critter taken in by Idaho's Earth Fire Institute. And they say he's a robust, sometimes moody animal, who accepts fresh willow branches and spruce logs. But he likes other treats. And his caretakers note that Teddy was once called Piney, until via an animal communicator, he voiced that he wanted to be called something softer and cuddlier, as he, quote, "didn't feel his essence was prickly at all." And the sanctuary notes that, as most people don't know that porcupines are sweet and gentle,

• 35:10Alie Ward?

  changing Piney's name to Teddy Bear will be a good opportunity for education. And now Teddy is famous on the internet. When Teddy eats a pumpkin, say.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:20Alie Ward?

  And our brains get flooded with serotonin. Do most porcupines make that noise if they're munching on something? Or is Teddy just particularly, like a bon vivant?

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  He's a real esthete.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  I think what's happening is those are the noises that a baby porcupine, called a porcupet, makes when it's nursing.

• 35:46Alie Ward?

  Porcupet. This one word is the thin string holding up my sanity in 2025.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  I think that what's happening is those noises are stimulating milk letdown in the mom, which means like they're stimulating the exact chemicals you're talking about, like serotonin and oxytocin. And so I think what's happening with Teddy is like delayed adult, whatever, like he just never lost that function from, from being a baby to being an adult, and he still makes those noises. But we generally don't hear them in fully grown, wild adult porcupines as much as we would like to.

• 36:22Alie Ward?

  Can I ask you approximately 1,000 questions from listeners?

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 36:27Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God. Okay. Stephanie Ross wants to know, are there any predators that are undeterred by their quills? Like, what are porcupine predators? Curtis Takahashi says, it seems like they'd be a very painful prize. Mouse Paxton, Anastasia Doherty, Jaleen Tangan, John Wallace, and Olivia Lester all asked. Olivia asked, what animals don't care about eating the spines? And we'll get to the answer of that question in just one moment. But first, let's eject some money into a tender cause. And this week, it's the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society. And the NAFWS is a national tribal organization seeking to expand the exchange of information and management techniques related to self-determined tribal fish and wildlife management.

• 37:11Alie Ward?

  Also, Tim told me that one soapbox he'd like to get on is that Congress passed the 1973 Endangered Species Act to appropriate some money to research on species of special concern. However, Tim told me federally recognized tribes are not eligible to apply for these funding sources. They have a separate and much smaller pot of money that's dedicated to tribal management of wildlife, and it amounts to about one-sixth of the money per acre, which sucks. And Tim wanted you to know about that and also that the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society is a worthy cause. So thank you to Tim for the heads up and to the NAFWS for their work and to everyone who cares about land stewardship and ecology. And that donation was made possible by our sponsors. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.

• 37:55Alie Ward?

  If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have, or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before Ologies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates. They have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients. You can get paid. They have built-in tools for scheduling and invoicing and email, all in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up, or someone who's just starting a business,

• 38:40Alie Ward?

  I'm like, dude, Squarespace. So head to Squarespace.com/Ologies for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code OLOGIES to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You can do it. I can't tell you how many times your mother and I have been like, what are we gonna eat? It's constant. You know what I mean? Busy schedules. You got nutrition goals. You have your stomach and brain maybe not agreeing. Maybe you got picky eaters. This is where Hungry Root comes in. I think they are great. Hungry Root figures out what foods you like, what you don't, what kind of fits your life. And then they're like, hey, how about these groceries? And how about these recipes? And you're like, what are you, my second brain? For me and Jared, we are eating more plant-based meals. Jared is also dairy-free.

• 39:24Alie Ward?

  So it's been really helpful to take the guesswork out of mealtime and also learn more recipes that maybe we hadn't tried before. I also like that we're not spending time meal planning or grocery shopping, because it just shows up for us. Some of my favorite recipes for Hungry Root, they have a lot of really great curry bowls and stir fries. I signed up for snacks, too, because I'm a human being. So explore my digital cookbook, Pod Mom and Dad's High Protein and Low Dairy Menu, for free at hungryroot.com/Ologies. And for a limited time, you can get 40% off your first order plus a free item in every box for life with code OLOGIES. Let's have dinner. Peppa Pig is your preschooler's best friend.

• 40:06Alie Ward?

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• 40:32Alie Ward?

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• 41:07Alie Ward?

  Listen, sometimes you get out of your routine. That happened to me recently when I went out of town and I realized I forgot my Ritual Essential for Women 18+. It's a multi that I've been taking for years. And guess who landed in another country without them? Me. Didn't feel right. They contain nine key nutrients, two delayed-release capsules designed for optimal absorption. But Ritual, why do I love them so much? They have a team of scientists. They poured over thousands of studies to figure out what are common gaps that people need in their diet, but they don't actually consume. It's also designed to be gentle on the stomach. You can take it with or without food, which I love. Plus, I like that it looks like a tiny lava lamp. I tell you that every time, but it has these beads and oil, and it tastes like mint. Easy down the hatch. I usually take them in the morning.

• 41:52Alie Ward?

  And the reason why I've stuck with Ritual for so many years is because my schedule's all over the place. Sometimes I'm eating breakfast, sometimes I'm running through Airport with one shoe. So instead of striving for perfect health, aim for supporting foundational health. Save 25% on your first month at ritual.com/ologies. That's ritual.com/ologies for 25% off your first month. Okay, back to that question. Who dares to eat a porcupine for lunch? Your dog obviously sucks at it, but some critter must be able to conquer them, right?

• 42:23Speaker 01

  It's mostly about avoiding them. So I don't think there are any animals that are good, at least for North American porcupines. I don't, I don't think there are any predators that are good at dealing with the spines. But mostly, we talk about mountain lions and fishers. Mountain lions, it's like a cultural thing. So the mom will teach her children how to eat porcupines. If they're gonna do it, you have to learn how to do it. And I think mountain lions will flip the porcupine over and then go at the stomach where there are no quills. I mean, mountain lions are like meticulous cats, so they'll also scrape off all the quills once the porcupine's dead and consume it.

• 42:59Alie Ward?

  So kind of like how your mom or your guardian might teach you to peel a banana, or cut a pineapple, or watch your drink at a bar?

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Fishers are a big weasel, and they attack the face, which also doesn't have any quills, till it's dead, and then they'll eat through the stomach. There's some cool papers from Wisconsin that suggest that martens, the smaller weasel, will eat baby porcupines by coming up under the snow. Like, they'll tunnel through the snow and somehow hear the porcupine, or like see a porcupine, and then tunnel under and then come up and get at the stomach that way.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Then like, other stuff like coyotes have been shown to, to learn how to catch porcupines, and I think some other species as well, like maybe owls.

• 43:49Alie Ward?

  So fishers eat the face, martens eat babies through snow tunnels, mountain lions go for the guts first, and Tim says that coyotes and bobcats are also able to get a bite of them here and there. And owls, how are owls even attempting this? They're like small chickens. Well, through surprise attacks to the face. Sometimes it Works out well for them, but wildlife rehabbers tell tales of demoralized owls whose failure has to be plucked out of their flesh one by one. Now, as for the South American porcupines, this 2020 article in the journal Foodwebs titled "Predation of a Brazilian Porcupine by an Ocelot and a Mineral Lick in the Peruvian

• 44:30Alie Ward?

  Amazon" explains that when a patch of salt becomes kind of like a local pub for porcupines, they are vulnerable to the bravest of predators, including the ocelot. Now, the African porcupines, they got to watch out for hyenas and lions and leopards. But how scary are porcupines, like using numbers? Is it mostly an entry through the face?

• 44:56Speaker 01

  I think it's mostly the belly, except for fishers who are just mean like every other weasel.

• 45:02Alie Ward?

  Yikes. Olivia Callis, Alexander von Fritz Bitts and his mom, Issa Brilard and Eating Dog Hair for a Living want to ask, Alexander asks, how many quills do they have? Is there an average number? Is it like 4,000 or does it totally vary by species?

• 45:18Speaker 01

  I'm sure it varies by species. I don't know that there are a lot of studies for every species. For North American porcupines, there's 30,000 quills. That's the number that everybody uses. And I have been desperately trying to find, there's two separate papers where people have counted quills on North American porcupines, and they both came up with about 30,000.

• 45:38Alie Ward?

  Woo.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Both of them, the introduction reads like somebody's getting punished. Like, they did something wrong and their advisor was like, just go count quills.

• 45:48Alie Ward?

  I was going to ask, like, how do you get that?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  In terms of average, as far as I know, only two people have ever counted all 30,000. So, so hard to come up with a comparison.

• 46:02Alie Ward?

  Oh, man. I think that if you were really feeling like not super social, it would be nice to just be like, I'm just gonna dip in the back and just count some quills for a while.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:12Alie Ward?

  Nobody's talked to me. Everywhere you Google, every old, yellowed mammalogy book you scour, you will find that 30,000 quills quote. And I kept digging further and further for the true source, and it led me to a 1972 paper that then quoted E.R. Hall's Mammals of Nevada, which is a famed and well-respected 1946 book, which had no cited source, but every other paper I found cited the 1946 book or each other. I was on this research loop. It felt like driving in a roundabout. But finally, I located a more recent 2017 paper in the Journal of Dairy and Veterinary Sciences by a researcher out of the University of Calgary, and it was titled, "Getting to the Point: How Many Quills Does a North American

• 46:55Alie Ward?

  Porcupine Have?" And the methodology section read, "The dorsal surface, or back, was denuded, and the quills sorted. Quills were then counted by the number of sharp, pointed ends." The results? The author counted 44,006 quills, which, they note, is 46.7% greater than the original claim of 30,000 quills made by E.R. Hall in 1946. Now, this information means nothing to you, probably, but I needed to find out to get a little bit of closure in my life. Also, counting up to 44,000 sounds tedious, but it has been done for science. People wanted to know, when do they get the quills?

• 47:37Alie Ward?

  Ruby Gordon, Issa Brilard, Olivia Lester, Gretchen Schroeder, Katie Biardi, Cheryl Butner, Brittany Corrigan, Nicole Kleinman, Sammy, and Elise Young, Alexa Roth, and... Jonathan asks, "Is it painful for a mama porcupine to give birth?" Julia Bingham wanted to know, "Are they born spiky? When do their pricks become properly prickly?" Chrisless said, "I pet a baby porcupine once, right on his soft, little snoot."

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 48:02Alie Ward?

  He didn't have sharp quills yet. So yeah, when do they start to grow those?

• 48:06Speaker 01

  And I cannot emphasize enough how cute porcupines are. It's like, I can't, and photographs do not capture the like, oh my God, they're so small and like so cute and just have no idea how painful they could be. But they are born with quills, but the quills haven't like hardened yet. So the quills are soft and they're born, I think, headfirst so that, you know, the quills are sort of pointing backwards in North American porcupines. So they're coming out not against the grain. And then within a couple of hours, the quills will harden.

• 48:39Alie Ward?

  Oh, within a few hours?

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:42Alie Ward?

  And you said they're made of keratin. Is that kind of like having a soggy fingernail that dries out?

• 48:48Speaker 01

  That's a great question. I'm guessing it's like having a wet fingernail.

• 48:51Alie Ward?

  Yeah, interesting. This next one was asked by Charlotte Parkinson, Olivia Callis, Lisa Gorman, Jennifer Lemon, Anthony Richards, Kaitlin Morrison, Carol Catherine Vella, Emily Tataro, and Aurora Cullen. And Zed Shiragane wanted to know, in Zed's words, do they regrow the spines that they lose during altercations? Or is it just a one and done deal? Like, do they shed them and regrow them like we do hair?

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:17Alie Ward?

  Oh, so they just come and go?

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:19Alie Ward?

  Does that mean that you might find porcupine quills just in the leaf litter in the forest?

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that you could. I think it's a proverbial needle in a haystack trying to find a single quill in the leaf litter. But if they're fighting, like if the males are fighting, or, you know, in some circumstances, the females are more territorial and they will fight over territories, then they will quill each other. Or if a porcupine falls, then a bunch of quills come out. Like, that's, I think, a more likely scenario where you might just find them in nature, where they've come out in sort of a pile, rather than just a lone quill.

• 49:57Alie Ward?

  Mouse Paxton, Chris Curious, Dana Sprouse, and Lisa Vares wanted to know, what is the best way to remove quills from a pet if they go after a porcupine? Mouse asks. Dana Sprouse asked, said they suck to yank out of a dog's nose. So Dana, I'm sorry about your dog.

• 50:18Alie Ward?

  How do vets get them out?

• 50:20Speaker 01

  I am not a vet. I think that they, if there's a lot of them, I think they'll anesthetize them first and then just pull them out. I was reading that there's, you know, some people talk about cutting them, like clipping them ahead of time to like let air out or pressure out or something. And I think that might be sort of an old wives tale. And you, you gotta just kind of go through with pliers and pull them out one by one. And as soon as possible, otherwise they'll start migrating into the body and causing real problems.

• 50:50Alie Ward?

  Okay, so I dipped deeper into this topic and I found an article written by Dr. Seth Bynum, a veterinarian and also presumably a hunter, as it was published in the magazine Gondog. But he says that as long as the pup is safely restrained, you can use pliers or like a Leatherman to grip them one by one at the base of the quill. And he writes, employ a firm and purposeful grip and pull with the same enthusiasm. But it might hurt a little. And so go slow and don't get greedy is his advice. Or you risk breaking the quills off if you try to remove them like several at a time. And when you're removing them, he says, put them all in one place

• 51:32Alie Ward?

  or like in a dish of water so they don't roll around or get lost underfoot and then stab you doubly. Now, if the victim has a bunch around the eyes or in the mouth, Seth says a vet visit is in order because there are nooks and crannies that quills can burrow into, like in the gums or the eye. And left undiscovered, that can lead to a lot of pain. Obviously, and infection. And the vet also can sedate your poor dog, which if it were me, I'd be like, hell, yeah, give me that sweet, sweet nectar and render me numb. I'm out. Now, this article also did me the favor of busting flim flam. And that cutting quills does not make them easier to remove. It just wastes time while the tissue gets more inflamed and the quills kind of deepen their grip.

• 52:17Alie Ward?

  And also, while if you love it, lube it, is generally good life advice. It does not apply to this situation. As Seth writes, that it just results in little more than a slippery dog and tools that can't get their grip. And yeah, when in doubt, see a vet. Veterinarians, we love you. Your work is hard. You're worth every penny. If my hairy daughter, Grammy, ever got needle blasted, I would be Ubering a medevac. Emily Krieger, Benjamin, Shante, first time question asker, Charlie Eisman, Lindsay Malone, and Isa wanted to know about their personality. Emily asked, do they have a vibe? Nervous, irritable, curious, chill?

• 53:01Alie Ward?

  Shante said, I feel like porcupines always look so chill and calm. Do the quills mean that most predators leave them alone? Charlie Eisman says, are they as oblivious as they seem? Judgmental, but a good question.

• 53:14Alie Ward?

  What are they like?

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think like every species has sort of a root personality, right? I mean, and I think it's okay to anthropomorphize in that sense. Like, weasels are different from horses, are different from cows. And porcupines definitely have a type. They're kind of slow. They're pretty sweet. They seem pretty chill. But then within that, I mean, like every other species, like dogs or cats or humans, like individuals have total personalities, like the angrier ones and the sweeter ones and the dopier ones. And so there's real variation that you can tell between them.

• 53:48Alie Ward?

  Tim drew a beautiful comparison that will live with me forever.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  One, sorry, I meant to add, like, they're basically sloths, right? Like, sloths are also folivores, which means that they get very little energy from their diet, and that's why they're so slow. And the only way to avoid predators for sloths is to, like, be up in the tree and camouflage as much as possible. North American porcupines are like, just sort of another evolutionary solution to getting food from leaves as your main diet sources. Like, they also are pretty low-energy and not super smart, but rather than camouflage, they have all this incredible defense mechanism.

• 54:30Alie Ward?

  Porcupines, hell raiser sloths forever. Now, are they well-liked in nature? Are they lonely for other forest companions? Asked Cinnamon, Win Costantini, Issa Brillard, Alexander Kidd, Average Pie, Colin Roboton, Mark D., Annalise D., Young, Pabu34, and Emily. Oh, a bunch of people did ask about social structure. Ewen Munro wanted to know, are they friends with any other woodland creatures? And Yasmin Alu said, "I saw a porcupine in an aquarium that was almost always curled up in a corner on its stick." Are they social creatures, or was it depressed? They want to know. Should I contact the aquarium? Yasmin asks. But like, are they solitary creatures?

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Well, they're nocturnal, so I think that's like, an issue with zoos in general for porcupines, is they're probably just sleepy.

• 55:17Alie Ward?

  Imagine, it's the middle of the night, in your bedroom, and a steady stream of screaming, sticky children are just parading through, being like, I don't know, her energy seems kind of off. You're like, begone, off with you. But porcupines, do they party?

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's sort of a mix. I have not seen them socializing with other forest creatures, but, you know, I mean, the mom is with her porcupet four-plus months, and they are, you know, she's teaching them, like, here's how you climb a tree, and these are the preferred foods that we like to eat. And then there are certain situations where they will hang out together, whether it's in places like California, where they're sharing those willow patches, or in places where it's snowy and cold, and they'll share a den with each other. But they seem, I think, I would say, generally kind of indifferent to one another, if they're not aggressively defending a territory.

• 56:11Alie Ward?

  How are they getting these dens? Because some, the Eurasian African- An expert once told me that they they burrow, the expert is you, and it was a few minutes ago.

• 56:23Alie Ward?

  What when the arboreal ones, are they able to dig a den or do they find like an old badger haunt? Or they found like a rock cave?

• 56:30Speaker 01

  I think in most places it's like rock piles or downed trees or like hollow living trees or standing dead hollow trees. And so that's a really important part of porcupine ecology is in places in winter where they need a den, like that could be a really limiting factor for porcupines is not having enough dens or enough shelter. In California, in this dune system, they were in like these burrows in the dunes. And it really, we didn't witness it, but it really seemed like they were the ones that were digging out these burrows in the sand and maintaining them themselves.

• 57:06Alie Ward?

  You know, a few people asked about nutrients. Verena Runstadler and Felipe Jimenez wanted to know why they like salt. Felipe said, I heard that porcupines have a surprising craving for salt and will even gnaw on sweaty tools or clothes to get it. Does that have a physiological reason or is it just taste?

• 57:25Speaker 01

  And Aldous Rose, again, I just keep coming back to him. His book is so wonderful, but he was talking to a summer camp owner and the summer camp owner was like, why do only the boys cabins have porcupine damage on them?

• 57:39Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  And Aldous Rose is like, because boys are peeing on their cabin.

• 57:45Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  They so all vertebrates need to maintain a one to one ratio of potassium to sodium. It's like critical, like potassium and sodium ions are used in nerve and muscle cell function. And a lot of herbivores, plants tend to be really high in potassium. And so herbivores almost universally face this problem of how do you get enough sodium to balance the like huge amounts of potassium that you get through your diet? So yeah, porcupines are one of those and they will seek out salt, sodium wherever they can find it.

• 58:19Alie Ward?

  I watched a video of porcupine legend Aldous Rose in a little shed in the woods that he uses to attract porcupines.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  And Rose and like a bunch of other people use salt blocks to attract porcupines so they could catch them.

• 58:32Alie Ward?

  Oh, that's gotta be such a find for a porcupine.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, he and he was saying like, you know, it was like a shed outside of his cabin that he would just put these salt sticks out and porcupines from kilometers around once they learned about it would come in to to take advantage.

• 58:47Alie Ward?

  KDB, Matt Thompson and Mallory Avery wanted to know about cars. Mallory says, my dad has a story of a porcupine eating the wires on the underside of his truck when parked in the woods. But up in the mountains in British Columbia, Kate B says, a lot of the trailheads have chicken wire that you can borrow to wrap around the base of your vehicle. Maybe they chew your brake lines. Is this flim flam? Have you heard of that much?

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's totally real. And for rodents in general, like we deal with that with jackrabbits, like they're always chewing on various lines and stuff. And I'm not totally sure on the chemical composition for the underside of a car in general. But for porcupines, especially the further north you go, you know, cars are going to be covered in salt. So like we distribute a lot of sodium on the roads, which is a problem for porcupines who are salt driven in early spring. And they results in a lot of road kills. But I think that probably also is an attractant. Like if you're if you're driving around and you got a bunch of sodium splashed up to the underside of your car, that's probably also attracting them.

• 59:49Alie Ward?

  Oh, if only we had like a whole episode about roadkill. Look at that. Boy, howdy, we do. It's linked in the show notes, Roadkill Ecology. It's a banger. Also, patrons Benjamin, Susan Osborne, Magzeroni and Shule Rank, first time question asker, asked about their numbers. Let's talk numbers. Well, you mentioned that cars can be, they're, you know, an ultimate predator for them essentially on accident. But how are populations doing? You mentioned that indigenous populations are asking where they went. But overall, what are you finding there?

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  We don't really know. And there's just not like a really great funding source to study this at scale. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence from Western North America that they seem to be declining. There was a graduate student in Montana who set out to do her thesis on porcupines and then couldn't find any. And so her thesis kind of shifted gears there. Like, there just seems to be a bunch of people everywhere are noticing.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  There aren't as many porcupines as we used to see. And in New York, they've gone through a couple of scabies outbreaks, which is really horrible and awful for them and pretty devastating for the populations.

• 1:01:03Alie Ward?

  So there are a few theories about porcupine booms and busts. And Tim says that one researcher, Richard Schweitzer's work, shows that one single mountain lion can really reduce porcupine numbers pretty quickly. And another factor is the timber industry. And in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California, there used to be these old growth Douglas fir redwood stands, but porcupines do not love to eat them. Now, once the lumber industry mowed down all those older trees, what grew in their place were different plant sources that they loved, like a stoner loves fourth meal. So their populations exploded. And in the 1970s, researchers predicted the natural decline from that baby porcupet boom, partly because timber companies could say, look, they're doing fine.

• 1:01:48Alie Ward?

  But that was temporary. Now, speaking of a porcupine menu. So, OK, they strip the tree, they strip the bark off the trees. Are they eating it?

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so in summer, when there's leaves on the trees, they eat the leaves and then like fruit, like apples and stuff like that. And then in winter, there's no leaves left. And so they have to scrape the outer bark off and then they consume the inner bark, which is like a terrible nutritional strategy. They lose like 25% of their body weight.

• 1:02:15Alie Ward?

  Tim emailed me after this interview to say he wanted to shout out a couple of researchers, Kara Appel and Perasa Bellamaric, who found that porcupines have more foresight than me and they seem to scout out winter habitat during the summer. So ahead of times, in the dunes where they worked, in the middle of summer, they would go out to their winter homes in the four dunes to look for the best shelters. And then they'd just go back to those places that were most protected from the wind and the rain the following winter. So they remembered where to go. Also, in terms of like moving to a new town for porcupines, Tim mentioned that oldest rose hypothesized that they eat each other's poop and they rely on others' gut bacteria to digest the

• 1:02:59Alie Ward?

  Local plants. So Rose postulates that when a porcupine moves to a new area and gets the runs from eating new kind of leaves, the best way to get the local bacteria is by eating another porcupine's poop. Tummy's all better. But yes, porcupine decline is of course impacted by human interest.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  But by damaging trees, they become pests for timber operators. And so both like the feds and private timber companies spent the entire 20th century like hunting and killing porcupines all over the place. So that's another reason why they're declining. But like the benefit is you get all of these dead and decadent trees and trees that are falling down and trees that are exposed to fungus and stuff that almost surely like contributes to diversity, like bugs are getting access to the inner bark. That's drawing in woodpeckers. Woodpeckers are then like creating cavities in the trees that's providing holes and dens and stuff for other mammals.

• 1:03:57Alie Ward?

  And so were timber industries in conjunction with the government putting like a hit, like a price on their heads, kind of like with wolves?

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, up through the 50s. I mean, I think Vermont's killed like 100,000 porcupines per year. You know, just in one state every year with a small bounty on their skins. And I think or hope that, you know, this next generation of like ecological foresters are beginning to appreciate the fact that some of these species that damage trees are contributing to overall diversity. And maybe there's like a balance between cutting every tree down and killing every porcupine and like maybe leaving some so that they will help increase the health of the forest. And, you know, mountain lions are doing fairly well in Northern California and other parts of the Northwest.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  Cannabis growing uses a lot of rodenticide because porcupines come, you know, not just porcupines, but rodents in general come and gnaw on their water lines and probably eat their crops. And so that's, you know, a huge issue for a lot of species now is the. Widespread application of rodenticide on both public and private lands and it goes up the food chain.

• 1:05:06Alie Ward?

  Do you think with the cannabis farms, are they just getting cooked? Are they just so baked?

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. Yeah, I think a lot of animals probably are taking advantage of that. Yep.

• 1:05:19Alie Ward?

  Interesting. They're like, listen, you be born with quills, you break your bones falling out of a tree. I need to unwind.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  It seems really hard for porcupines because I had this student where we put this accelerometer on the porcupine and it was like, the accelerometer is not recording anything. Like, it could be sleeping, or walking, or eating, and like, the accelerometer's not moving at all. Like, they're so chilled to begin with that I can't even imagine what it would be like to be high.

• 1:05:50Alie Ward?

  Yeah, rodents can get high from eating the ganja. Maybe not as high as your roommate who simmered it in ghee, but you know, like, not, not high. Are their populations doing okay, or should we put save the porcupines like on our to-do lists?

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  That is on the to-do list. So California, I think, lists it as a species of special concern, which is like the first step before getting on the endangered species list, which means that it's now eligible for like additional funding. And that's sort of where we're at is like, there's a bunch of researchers across the Western US who are noticing this problem and starting to think about, okay, how do we actually count porcupines? And how do we get enough data longitudinally, like through time, to see that they really have declined? Not just from this sort of elevated baseline that we saw in the 60s and 70s after all these clear cuts, but like truly are disappearing from large parts of their range where they really should be. There's still lots of places, there are still lots of porcupines. It's not like a hair-on-fire situation, but it's, if I had more time and money, that

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  would definitely be a priority, would be like just documenting and knowing how they're doing.

• 1:06:52Alie Ward?

  I love that if you won Powerball, you'd be like, I'd be out there looking for porcupines.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:06:58Alie Ward?

  Well, actually, I've been thinking about your life, and if you don't mind, and you have to have a vase full of quills somewhere, like, you must have a collection of quills in a jar, in a pen holder. Where are they? How many do you have?

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  I brought some to put on video so I could show you. So, and it's a combination of like, yeah, quills, North American porcupine quills that I've collected, and then also people just give me quills, right? Like, I found this one, or like, I have friends at Zookeeper and had these extra, like, African crested porcupine quills. Here, have some. We actually ended up with the research we were doing, my grad students, Cara, Apple, and Persa Belamarich, organized, like, giving most of the quills that we got to the tribes that we were working with, because, like, again, they, you know, they used to go out and get the quills by hand, and then nowadays, they have to mail order them. So I was like, we got a bunch of extra quills, like, you guys should have these.

• 1:07:55Alie Ward?

  You know, a few people, Daisy Moser, who's up in Alaska, said, "I know people up here in Alaska who throw blankets on them to collect the quills for making traditional jewelry." Daisy says, "Seems better than the alternative way of getting them," which is, I imagine, getting clubbed in the face with a tail. But is that traditionally how indigenous folks are getting them? And also, a few people, El Wink, wanted to know, "As a crafter, porcupine pills are useful as tools and part of craft material. What's the best legal way to get them?" And Olivia Lester wanted to know, "How do humans use them, like, for weaponry, or tools, or writing? What are the ways that porcupine quills are obtained by humans? And what uses have you seen, kind of like, throughout history?"

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  So, obtaining quills in modern times, a person that I talked to in Humboldt, who was like, "I can't find porcupines on my normal route." She was like, you know, "I just drive around, and there were these roads where I would know, at night, I could go find a porcupine, see a porcupine, park the car, grab my..." She used a towel rather than a blanket, you know, "thwap the porcupine on the back, take the quills, and then, you know, you got..." Renewable, sustainable source of quills. So yeah, towel versus blanket method. I don't know.

• 1:09:07Alie Ward?

  And it doesn't hurt them, the porcupine, to eject them.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  I think, you know, I think probably like when you get to the point where you've got full coverage on the body, I'm guessing that not all of the quills got pushed down and released and you are pulling some out. But I think it's probably a temporary and again, better than, you know, killing them and getting the quills that way. Yeah. Uses like there's documentation of all kinds of things and the quill work for decoration is the, is the most beautiful, I think. And widespread and people dyed them like all kinds of incredible colors, like European colonizers would write about like, they're using colors that we can't access, like yellows and purples and reds and blacks.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  And just really incredible weaving of the quills together and into other materials like deer skin and leather, rawhide, fur decoration on all kinds of clothing and bags and stuff like that. The bristles on the tail were used for hair combs and brushes. And then there's a couple of papers that claimed that in sugar maple country, people would modify the quills to tap the maple syrup.

• 1:10:15Alie Ward?

  So as a tool for decor, for a bunch of uses, I mean, to have that kind of charactenized thing is, uh, it's got to be valuable. What about flim flam? What's, what's the most annoying misconception about porcupines?

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Uh, that they shoot their quills. That's number one. Yeah. So they don't shoot quills. Yeah. No porcupines shoot their quills. You have to be pretty aggressive to get quelled.

• 1:10:36Alie Ward?

  So that settles that. David Villa Franco, Alya Myers, Papka34, Aaron White, Kurt Swanson, Blair C., Kayla Meyer, Charlotte Short, Tina's and first time question askers, Darian and Emily's mom and Don Ray Oliveira, who bravely admitted to spending most of their life, ahem, four decades, they say, believing that porcupines shot their quills, Sonic the Hedgehog style. Hearsay, heresy, horse pucky flim flam. Now we know.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  And then number two, I guess I would say is the confusion over hedgehogs versus porcupines.

• 1:11:06Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, you know, hedgehogs are not even rodents and so it totally evolved independently and same physical structure. They're also charactenized, but yeah, totally different species.

• 1:11:18Alie Ward?

  I guess, speaking of hardening, charactenizing stuff, Deny Sprouse, Zuleka Pevic, wanted to know, in Deny's words, do they have red teeth? Do they have that orange teeth? Like we just did a beaver episode. Is there enamel that kind of like super hard on one side and then soft on the other?

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And then that creates the sort of chisel shape that they use to scrape bark off and they're continually growing and just on the incisors, right? The front of the big incisors in the front are, yeah, orange.

• 1:11:46Alie Ward?

  Oh, last listener question. Potato Puffer wanted to know, are their bellies soft?

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Uh, sure.

• 1:11:54Alie Ward?

  I mean, I guess compared to the dorsal side.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  There's no quills on them. They've got the fur, their bellies. So, yeah.

• 1:12:01Alie Ward?

  Okay, good. Had to know. Last question I always ask, and I know we've been talking about quills, we've been talking about leather gloves. Is getting quilled the worst part of the job? Or is it like meetings? Like, are meetings worse than getting quilled?

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  The worst part of the job, honestly, is, I won't give you my bummer answer. The worst part of the job

• 1:12:21Alie Ward?

  No, give me your bummer answer.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  When an animal dies, that's absolutely like the few times I've thought about quitting and doing something else is like, you know, I mean, and not just with porcupines, but animals in general. Like, if you're in the field and something goes wrong and you know that you like contributed to their death, that's pretty much the worst feeling in the world. The practical answer is like just the funding and trying to to find ways to fund research that are, that's in sort of this gray area where it's like, it's hard to find the right funder who wants to pay for the stuff that you want to do and keep it going for a really long time.

• 1:12:52Alie Ward?

  You need some sort of directory of Powerball winners.

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, benefactor.

• 1:12:57Alie Ward?

  Yeah, you need a benefactor. In the Renaissance, you need a benefactor of some kind.

• 1:13:03Alie Ward?

  I hope someone listens to this and is like, as a billionaire, I've been looking for a pet cause and it turns out.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Let's save the porcupines.

• 1:13:12Alie Ward?

  Yeah, Teddy's doing a lot of work too for the brand image, you know. Teddy's getting paid handsomely in pumpkins and stuff like that, which is good. Like, as an influencer, he's got like the Lamborghini of cause. What about the best?

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  I have so many. And like, you know, on the teaching side, I get paid to learn and ask questions about stuff that I'm interested in and then share that information with other people. And that's awesome. And then being able to find money to pay early career scientists to go into the field and like spend a summer out in the world studying animals that they're interested in is also like incredible. Just knowing that.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  I've had the opportunity to support like, you know, spending that much time with focused attention, like, learning about some landscape is just an incredible thing that we've set up as a society to make happen.

• 1:14:10Alie Ward?

  As the porcupine guy, Tim is just a beacon of knowledge, even for not smart questions.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  People text me all the, not all the time, but like, you know, I know a true friend when they're like, I saw a porcupine. Here's a photo of it. Or like, my dog just got quilled. Like, here's a photo of that. Those are, you know, brighten my day when that happens. The best part of studying porcupines in the wild, though, was, and it was a total surprise, the scale of the study area was pretty small. Like, you could walk north, south, probably three hours, and maybe an hour east, west. Like, from the minute that we got out there and started looking for porcupines, we just started naming things without even talking about it. It was just like, oh, there's this location that this thing happened. We're gonna call it that. And there's this really popular, like, willow stand that a bunch of different porcupines were gonna call it this.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  And started naming the porcupines. Like, it just felt very instinctive, like, something that humans have been doing for a million years, is like, walking around as a group and a team, looking for animals and learning about the landscape that we're walking through was just really joyful. And seeing it, that landscape, through the porcupine's eyes and going to places that I would never go before, and like, thinking about how they were using the landscape was just, um, yeah, incredible.

• 1:15:30Alie Ward?

  Do they have good eyes, by the way?

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  I don't think so. I think it's mostly the nose. Yeah.

• 1:15:35Alie Ward?

  So seeing the landscape through even better than the porcupine's eyes?

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and not smelling whatever they're smelling.

• 1:15:42Alie Ward?

  I hope to one day see one in the wild. Who knows? At least I know what to look for. But thank you so much for letting me get to know porcupines. And my wish for you is that someone incredibly wealthy listens to this.

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for your interest in porcupines.

• 1:16:01Alie Ward?

  Who doesn't have an interest in porcupines?

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:16:04Alie Ward?

  Get real.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  Thanks, everyone, for your universal love of the best mammal on earth.

• 1:16:13Alie Ward?

  So ask ecological people illogical questions because they are much less prickly than you'd fear. Thank you so, so much to Dr. Bean for such a lively discussion of these creatures who are so huggable, at least in our hearts. Now, you can find out more about Tim's work and the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society, the links in our show notes and on our website, which is also linked in the show notes. Thank you to everyone supporting and submitting questions at patreon.com/ologies, which you can join for one hot dollar. Ologies merch is at ologiesmerch.com. Also, side note, we have a kid-friendly and classroom-safe spinoff show called Smologies, which you can find anywhere you get podcasts. You can look for the new green artwork by Portland-based muralist Bonnie Dutch. You

• 1:16:55Alie Ward?

  can spread the word on Smologies. We are at Ologies on Instagram at BlueSky. I'm at @AllyWard. Thank you to Erin Talbert for adminning the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Avaleen Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardware is at website. Noelle Dilworth is our lovely scheduling producer, whose ceiling collapsed during our recent LA rains. Not a big deal. Ellie's doing great. We're doing great here. Susan Hale is our managing director, who keeps the sky from falling. Jake Chaffee is our capable and very boopable assistant editor. And Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio is our lead editor and a Canadian, who is thankfully still friends with us Americans. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this week, it's that last week, I read a review that began, "Thanks, handsome." And

• 1:17:38Alie Ward?

  I just thought this was a reference to me being like your internet father, and also just generally, I guess, dapper and appealing. And it made me feel really good. But it turns out that "Thanks, handsome" was actually in reference to the podcast Handsome, which had just shouted out "Ologies." So, thank you to the Handsoms over at Handsome. I'm embarrassed. Also, please keep speaking out about our park service employees, our federal workers, our scientists, researchers, public servants, all the people who work so passionately and diligently to make the United States I live in and everyone on the globe's present and futures better. Read the news, call congresspeople, keep shouting, keep learning,

• 1:18:20Alie Ward?

  keep telling ologists how much we love them. Okay, @AllyWard, over and out. Until next week. Bye-bye.

• 1:18:28Alie Ward?

  Homeology, cryptozoology, lithology, nanotechnology, meteorology, geology, anthropology, seriology, geology.

• 1:18:46Alie Ward?

  All right, don't start with me, Porcupine. Come here, come here, give me a hug. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S dot com slash ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information.

• 1:19:25Speaker 06

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