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Thirteen ways of looking at a hedgehog
Natural History, July-August, 1998 by Chris Reiter, Gina C. Gould
In the middle of the seventh century B.C., before Aesop's tortoise outran the hare, the Greek lyric poet Archilochus observed a simple truth in a hedgehog's meeting with a wily fox. "The fox knows many things," he wrote, "but the hedgehog knows one big thing." A mercenary soldier as well as a poet, Archilochus must have been intrigued by the spray hedgenog's signature defense, its ability to curl up into a prickly, unappetizing ball--one that might be pawed, but eaten only at the risk of getting a mouthful of spines.
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Still prickly as ever, the hedgehog, a grape fruit-sized omnivorous mammal that lives throughout Eurasia and Africa, is covered by a coat of some 7,000 spines. Unlike those of porcupines and echidnas, hedgehog spines are short, lightweight, and flexible, typically lying on the back in a dense thicket and bristling when the hedgehog is threatened.
When a hedgehog is in grave danger, specialized muscles enable it to fold up and cinch in its head and legs with a fleshy hood, much as a cold camper does with a mummy bag, furnishing this otherwise vulnerable animal with a formidable deterrent to predation.
Indeed, the hedgehog so commonly frustrates predators that its lineage has survived for close to 70 million years; hedgehogs have outwitted not only the fox but extinction itself. Although Archilochus could not have been aware of what the fossil record would reveal about the hedgehog's long evolutionary history, he was a keen enough observer of animals to see that the spiny creature was a survivor; being a poet, he also saw a muse. As human ecologist Paul Shepard wrote: "More than monuments to human imagination, the whole panoply of [animals'] mythic, fantastic forms is based on a thousand millennia of watching and studying real wild animals."
With a few exceptions, human observations of hedgehogs over nearly three thousand years have resulted in a lasting image of prickly steadfastness. In Latvian folktales and Chinese poetry, in English children's stories and ancient Egyptian myths, hedgehogs appear both as admirable survivors and as steady, benevolent companions. In its most recent incarnation as the comic-book and cartoon character Sonic, the hedgehog has been catapulted into superhero status--ensuring that American children half a world away from any wild hedgehogs will be at least as familiar with the beast as their parents were with Beatrix Potter's kindly rendition, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. The narratives of natural and evolutionary history reaffirm the hedgehog as a survivor and form a foundation for the menagerie of hedgehog images.
In the Old World, one needn't be a naturalist or literary scholar to catch a glimpse of a hedgehog. In England, for example, the common European hedgehog, Erinaceus europaeus, thrives near human settlements and frequents backyard gardens, pastures, and hedgerows, and it is ubiquitous there as both mascot of a national land trust and icon of the Mammal Society. This hedgehog is one of some thirteen spiny species found in Europe, Asia, and Africa. In contrast, the silky-skinned hedgehogs--also known as moonrats or gynmures--are found only in Indochina. Together they make up the family Erinaceidae. Predominantly burrowers, spiny hedgehogs have a dense weave of mottled black, brown, and white spines, a fleshy snout, short legs, and a furry belly. The more primitive moonrats are long-legged and covered with soft, dense fur rather than spines.
For small, solitary, nocturnal animals that at times hibernate (sleep through the winter) or estivate (sleep for shorter bouts during the summer), European hedgehogs are commonly encountered. Usually after dark, they leave their burrows or nests of twigs and leaves and forage in a home range no bigger than an acre. Relying on their acute senses of smell and hearing, they follow the rustling of leaves and grass and the scratching of digging insects, feasting on a smorgasbord of spiders, beetles, frogs, mice, occasional birds' eggs, and sometimes even snakes.
Hedgehog mastery over snakes is legendary. English folktales celebrated the animal's battles and supposed immunity to venom (it is resistant, but not immune, to the poison). In ancient Egypt, hedgehog amulets were worn to ward off snakebite. If approached by a snake, a hedgehog will bristle and roll up, fending off the reptile's striking fangs with its longer spines. When the snake is fatigued or wounded, the hedgehog attacks, biting along the backbone toward the head until the snake is dead. As the ninth-century Chinese poet Chu Chen Pu wrote of a hedgehog:
He ambles along like a walking pincushion,
Stops and curls up like a chestnut burr.
He's not worried because he's so little.
Nobody is going to slap him around.
Apparently, nobody has. Hedgehogs, we have discovered from the fossil record and from reconstructions of their family tree, have been around since the late Cretaceous. They survived not only the extinction that wiped out the large dinosaurs but also later catastrophes that killed off great numbers of other mammals.
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