Gail Langeloh, age 10, of Rowayton, Connecticut, for her question:
How long are a porcupine's quills?
Our native porcupine has quills that measure about an inch or an inch and a half long. But when he drives them into the face of an enemy, it takes only a dozen or so to defeat a.fox, a coyote or even a mighty mountain lion. The unhappy victim crawls away in agony and often dies a lingering death. However, our Mr. Prickles is not the only porcupine in the world. In Africa he has a cousin with much much longer prickles.
A porcupine quill does not look like a deadly dangerous weapon. Even if it were to bury its entire length in his enemy's flesh, it could pierce only one to one and one half inches deep. However, though we can see its needle sharp tip, we cannot see the dangerous barbs along its sides. Until the weapon enters a victim, these tiny barbs lie flat on the smooth quill. Then they open and turn backward to form hundreds of miniature hooklets. This fixes the deadly spike firmly in the wound. It works its way deeper and deeper into the flesh and eventually can kill the enemy.
One quill can cause a very painful wound that refuses to heal for a long time. But few victims get off so easily. Usually the porcupine stabs in a dozen or so of his deadly weapons. He can afford to lose them because he has 30,000 more, and new replacements soon grow. Some people still claim that he can shoot his quills from a distance. But experts and close up movies prove that this is not so.
When most animals are scared, they attack to defend themselves. But the porcupine is too well armed to bother. He tends to be fearless, slow and lazy. When threatened, he lets his enemy come close, face to face. Then he rattles the quills on his tail as a warning. This sends any sensible animal racing to another part of the woods. But some animals have more courage than sense. Or perhaps they are too famished to care.
When the rattle is ignored, the porcupine makes a sudden turn around and bashes his tail across the face of his enemy. His quills are loosely fixed to his skin and those that get jabbed into the enemy are pulled free. While the poor victim suffers with the painful stabs, the porcupine slowly ambles away about his business.
The rather short quills of our porcupine are deadly dangerous. But some of those that belong to the crested porcupine are almost 20 times longer. This fellow lives in Italy and Sicily and parts of Africa. He is a big black and white pincushion with a mixture of quills on his back. Some are short and thick, others are thinner. The thin ones may be 21 inches long.
In our north woods, there lives one animal who does not fear the prickly porcupine. This bundle of fur is a fierce weasel called the fisher. He does not eat fish, but he masters and devours all other animals in his neighborhood. He outsmarts Mr. Prickles by grabbing his unprotected face then gobbles him up, quills and all. So even the well armed porcupine is not absolutely unbeatable.