Hedgehogs can have as many as 8,000 spines on their bodies. When threatened, they curl into a ball making it painful for predators to try to eat them. A prickly hedgehog ball is not an inviting morsel of food!
Hedgehogs mainly stay on the ground, but they can swim quite well and even climb trees.
Facts about Hedgehogs:
When you curl up to go to sleep, you're just getting comfy. When a hedgehog curls up to go to sleep, it's for protection. Hedgehogs have prickly spines everywhere except on their face, legs, and bellies.
By curling into a tight ball and tucking in their heads, tail, and legs, they protect the parts of their bodies that do not have stiff, sharp spines. Often compared to pincushions, hedgehogs depend on their spines for defense—both while they sleep and when they face enemies.
If a fox, badger, or other predator approaches, a hedgehog rolls up tight. A prickly hedgehog ball is not an inviting morsel of food! Even if a bold predator does stop to investigate a rolled-up hedgehog, it's usually unsuccessful at prying the hedgehog open. Most predators move past the hedgehog to look for easier prey.
When hedgehogs are born—up to seven in a litter—their spines are soft and short. Soon after birth, their spines harden, becoming stiffer, sharper, and longer. Babies stay in the nest until they're about three weeks old. By that time, their eyes are open, their spines are effective, and they can safely follow their mother outside the nest as she looks for food.
Tops on the hedgehog's menu are insects, followed by small mice, snails, lizards, frogs, eggs, and even snakes. When a hedgehog goes after a snake to eat, its spines act as a shield against the reptile's bites.
Hedgehogs sometimes add extra protection to their spines by "self-anointing." Immune to poisons in some plants, hedgehogs sometimes eat those plants and then make a frothy saliva in their mouths.
The hedgehogs then lick their spines, spreading the saliva with the plant's poison all over the spikes. Some scientists think this is the hedgehog's way to make itself even more irritating to prowling predators.
Though hedgehogs mainly stay on the ground, they swim quite well and even climb trees. If one is up in a tree and wants to get down quickly—or falls—its spines come in handy once again. When the hedgehog hits the ground, it bounces, unhurt, because of the spines.
Text by Catherine D. Hughes
FAST FACTS The scientific name for the genus that includes the three species of Eurasian hedgehogs is Erinaceus.
The hedgehog family's scientific name is Erinaceidae, and it includes hedgehogs and gymnures.
Hedgehogs eat mainly invertebrates (creatures with no backbone, such as insects).
In addition to insects, hedgehogs also eat lizards, frogs, snakes, mice, small birds, eggs, and sometimes carrion (the flesh of animals that are already dead).
The normal heartbeat for one species of hedgehog is about 190 beats every minute. That rate drops to about 20 beats a minute while it hibernates in winter.
Sometimes people keep hedgehogs as pets. Captive hedgehogs will eat household and garden pests (that's insect pests... not little brothers or sisters)!
The normal lifespan of a hedgehog is about seven years.
© National Geographic Society. All Rights Reserved.