Porcupines breed in a very fascinating way. They migrate yearly to the beaches nearest their habitat. The female porcupines crawl down to rocky patches of the tidal zone during low tide and lay their eggs, which sink quickly and stick to the rock with a rubber cement like coating that hardens quickly. The portions of the egg not stuck to ro begin to drift outward from the egg in the water. These tendrils also harden quickly into spines that keep scavengers away until high tide. When water completely covers the eggs the male porcupine swims carefully out over the them and gingerly lowers himself over the eggs and shoots his seed into the water, it resembles the ink of a squid or octopus very much. the male's sperm instinctively swim down the spines of any eggs they come in contact with and hopefully germinate within it. The remaining seamen in the water is quickly washed out after the tide changed but most of it settles to the bottom as it searches for eggs. Sometimes it will end up attempting to germinate other sea life and can stain it the same color as the spiny porcupine eggs.
Ungerminated eggs quickly deflate and the hard portions of the tissue calcifies into a flat disc shape. the tide pulls it to one side and the "foot" at the botom will slowly come loose. This pulls the remains into an oval shap with a small lip at one side where it was previously attached to the rock.
Later on, also at night, the baby porcupines hatch and crawl far away from the tidepools of the beach where they were born. If they survive long enough, they will someday journey back to the tidepool of their birth to spawn more porcupines.
So next time you're at the beach and someone starts poking around a tidepool you'll know that the things some people call sea urchins are actually porcupine eggs, the purplish starfish are actually stained with spawn from the male porcupine (don't touch it! ew!), and sand dollars are the remains of unfertalized porcupine eggs. This is one of the reasons there are so few porcupines in Asia, their eggs are a delicacy. Most of the surviving Golden Porcupines of Japan and the Porcupanda of Southern China are kept on farms where they are artificially induced to spawn year round! However There are some very smalle reserves where these beautiful and noble species are being nursed back to health and someday they may be released back into the wild. If only man were to stop harming them and their ecosystem.
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Yes, they fornicate. Their quills all go the same direction and they can "lay them down". The male can never "rape" the female though, approach unwanted and YEOWCH! Especially since they can shoot the quills with a flick of the tail, which would be RIGHT in the male's jibbly bits! 0_0;
So, who's room is this party gonna be in?