Truly amazing, the Streaked Tenrecs of Madagascar, a hedgehog-like mammal has been filmed using it quills to communicate.
The tenrecs communicate by rubbing together specialised quills on their backs, which allow them to make high pitch ultrasound calls to each other in the forest undergrowth.
The film crew captured the unique footage in the eastern rain forests for the BBC series Madagascar.
Tenrecs are small mammals of variable body form. The smallest species are the size of shrews, with a body length of around 4.5 cm, and weighing just 5 grams, while the largest, the Common Tenrec, is 25 to 39 cm in length, and can weigh over a kilogram. Although they may resemble such animals as shrews, hedgehogs, or otters, they are not closely related to any of these groups, their closest relatives being other African, insectivoran-grade mammals such as golden moles and elephant shrews. The common ancestry of these animals, along with aardvarks, hyraxes, elephants, and sea cows in the group Afrotheria, was not recognized until the late 1990s.
Source: BBC, Bizarre mammals filmed calling using their quills and Wikipedia, Tenrecs.
