Picture the scene. Camden’s Electric Ballroom, circa 1976. The Sex Pistols are on stage, belting out ‘Anarchy in the UK’ to a pogoing mosh pit full of spiky-haired punks. The floor is sticky with lager, the air weighs heavy with attitude. And in the midst of it all, blending in perfectly, is the lowland streaked tenrec…
Go with me on this one. If ever there was an animal that would fit right in at a Sex Pistols gig, this would be it. The lowland streaked tenrec has both the look and the swagger. This small mammal, from the rainforests of Madagascar, sports a John Lydon-esque crown of punky yellow quills.
Matching stripes run the length of its otherwise black body, which is peppered with yet more quills. When the animal feels agitated, the detachable spines become erect and can be used as a weapon.
Non-receptive females, for example, will repel the advances of an amorous male by sticking the sharp, hard spines into his genitals. Predators, such as snakes and fossas (cat-like mammals found only in Madagascar), can also get ‘spiked’ and so are wary of these feisty hellraisers.
Also like Lydon, the lowland streaked tenrec is a musician of sorts. Look closely at the lower part of its back and you’ll notice a dense patch of 15 or 16 light brown quills. They sit on a thumbnail-sized pad of muscle and when the muscle contracts, it makes the quills vibrate.
This generates an extremely high-pitched sound, inaudible to humans, but obvious to fellow tenrecs, who use it to communicate. When animals rub body parts together to make sound, it’s known as stridulation. Crickets do it. Some snakes and spiders do it, but the streaked tenrec is the only mammal known to generate sound in this way.
The lowland streaked tenrec is one of 36 tenrec species, which all belong to the family Tenrecidae. The family is diverse. They range from species the size of a cocktail sausage to species the size of a sausage dog.
The lowland streaked tenrec is about the size of a breakfast sausage. Some tenrecs look like hedgehogs, others more like shrews or moles, but they’re all more closely related to animals such as elephants and sea cows, than they are to their familiar lookalikes.
This is because of their evolutionary history. Madagascar broke off from mainland Africa around 170 million years ago. Sometime after that, it’s thought the ancestor of tenrecs hitched a ride from Africa to Madagascar on board some floating detritus.
As a result, all tenrecs are of African heritage. They belong to the order Afrotheria, which includes other mammals of African origin, such as aardvarks, elephants and sea cows. Once ensconced in Madagascar, the tenrec’s ancestor then diversified into the many forms that exist today.
Lowland streaked tenrecs are social animals that live in big family groups. They use their long, bendy snouts to rootle around for earthworms and other invertebrates and have been spotted stomping on the ground with their front paws. This is thought to make the earthworms more active, so they can be detected and eaten more easily.
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