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.Follow Dr. Bean on Google Scholar and visit the Bean Lab websiteA donation went to NAFWS: Native American Fish & Wildlife SocietyMore episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesOther episodes you may enjoy: Castorology (BEAVERS), Lepidopterology (BUTTERFLIES), Ethnocynology (ANCIENT DOGS AND HUMANS), Lupinology (WOLVES), Road Ecology (ROAD KILL)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow Ologies on Instagram and BlueskyFollow Alie Ward on Instagram and TikTokEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jake ChaffeeManaging Director: Susan HaleScheduling Producer: Noel DilworthTranscripts by Aveline Malek Website by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn
Chapter 1: Why are porcupines fascinating creatures?
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 this. 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? 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 sent in questions, audio ones as well. You can submit them at patreon.com slash 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. Yes, I actually understand it. You keep doing you, Allie. Snakes rule.
I'm a fan of you and of snakes. Okay, for those who are looking, though, for Kids 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 erythrozinology, which comes from the Greek for... There's two major groups of porcupines. We're going to include both in this episode, but mostly we're focusing on the genus Erythrozon. Is that cool? Okay, great.
So get suited up for a thrilling array of weird stories involving barbs, grunts, squeaks, cartoonish noses, 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 erythrozinologist, Dr. Tim Bean. Do you get called Jim Beam a lot?
Jim Beam, yeah. And then sometimes like Kim for some reason for to-go orders. It's confusing.
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Chapter 2: Who is Dr. Tim Bean and what is his expertise?
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 porcupine attacking a leopard, those are generally African porcupines, Eurasian porcupines.
And then the North and South American porcupines are more arboreal. They spend a lot of time in trees, eating leaves, much shorter quills.
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 roadkill. 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. 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.
Yeah, that's possible. That definitely is possible, right? The defense stuff is much more important if you're on the ground and you're out 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. So they're not super coordinated and they'll quill themselves. And so the, yeah.
And so I think there's probably some benefit to having shorter quills in that case. Like it's sort 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. Yeah.
Oh, that's so embarrassing.
It's sad. I mean, so there's this incredible book by Aldous 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 he examined porcupine skeletons in museums, and he was saying a third of them have broken bones, which has got to be from falling out of trees.
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