Porcupine

[CAK]

My daughter just watched a porcupine waddle across the road towards Romberg Acres (between Ely and Winton).

In Finnish it's a piikkisika. "Piikki" means thorn or spine and "sika" means pig. So, it's a thorn pig.

Carl

[Kathryn Zimmerman]

Yes we had many as I remember when I lived outside of Helsinki as a child.

Sent from my iPhone

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ely Field Naturalists" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to elyfieldnatural...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[RogerPowell]

Dear Naturalists,

Sorry this response to Carl's post is a bit delayed.  Cons & I just got back from a Quetico trip and, needless to say, have missed several days of Field Naturalists' postings.

Carl's thorn pigs in Finland are hedgehogs and not porcupines.  Porcupines are large rodents (the Order Rodentia) with the typical large, paired front incisors and an herbaceous diet.  Our porcupine is a member of the family of New World porcupines, most of which live in South America.  The porcupines in the family of Old World porcupines live in Africa and southwestern Asia but not in Europe.  Hedgehogs, in contrast, are members of their own Order, the Erinaceomorpha, which means 'the hedgehog-like mammals'.  Hedgehogs live throughout most of Europe, Asia and Africa.  Hedgehogs are insectivorous and eat little if any vegetation.

Hedgehogs' spines and porcupines' quills are both modified, pointed guard hairs.  Hedgehogs' spines are basically stiff, pointed hairs that repel attackers.  They are relatively simple but effective tools.  Porcupines' quills are pointed but differ in 2 major ways from hedgehog spines.  First, porcupine quills have 'barb'-like scales.  I have attached 2 close-up photos of a quill.  One shows the typical view of a quill, the other shows how the scales are pointed towards the back and overlap like shingles on a roof.  When a quill goes into something, like skin, it is difficult to pull back out and tends to work its way further in.  Second, porcupine quills detach easily from the porcupine's skin, allowing them to stay in the skin of a predator foolish enough to attach a porcupine.  Luckily, porkies' quills are coated with oils that have mild antibiotic qualities.

So, both porcupines and hedgehogs carry sharp, pointy guard hairs but the hairs differ substantially and the species are only distantly related.  We do not have hedgehogs here.  Finland does not have porcupines.

    peace , , , , ,

        rog . . . . . .

--
Roger A Powell

Department of Applied Ecology
North Carolina State University
PO Box 918, Ely, Minnesota 55731

tel. 218-235-8808
e-mail: ne...@ncsu.edu
http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/users/r/rpowell/WebPage/

	Husk at leve
		Mens du gør det.
	Husk at elske
		Mens du tør det.
                            Piet Hein

[CAK]

Thanks for your comments, Roger.  However, although you may be technically correct about porcupines and hedgehogs relative to Finland, all the old Finns would beg to differ with you in practice.  When they came here, they universally applied "piikkisika" to the porcupines they found here, even if they didn't have any porcupines in the old country.  There's even an old song they sang that starts with "Piikkisika, piikkisika, porcupine, I see you hiding in that norway pine ..."  So, according to standard usage, a porcupine is a piikkisika -- and piikki means thorn or spine while sika means pig, so it's a thorn pig..

Also, if you check Google Translate, either from Finnish to English or from English to Finnish, piikkisika = porcupine.  And my old Finnish-English dictionary agrees with this.

So, what is a hedgehog in Finnish?  It's a siili which, as far as I know, seems to be just a name, without any other interesting meaning.

As an aside, I mentioned that the Finnish sika means pig.  Interestingly, siika means whitefish.  Notice that the only difference is a single "i" vs a double "i" in these words.  It's one of those cases where a very slight difference in pronunciation makes a significant difference in what is being named.

Carl

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ely Field Naturalists" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to elyfieldnatural...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

<Porky quill close, barbs.jpg><Porky quill.jpg>