Zurchin

Nicknamed the star urchin or space porcupine, this spiny, ball-shaped mollusk measures 6 inches to a foot across in loud reds, yellows, blues, purples or stripes, and creeps on a muscular belly-foot.

Left alone, a zurchin is harmless. Bothered, it uses internal gas to launch 1d4 hollow quills per round as far as a bowshot, with uncanny accuracy against man-sized targets. Each acts as a +2 dart for 1d4+2 damage, and it carries hundreds. Venom in each quill halts heart and lungs: fail a save vs. poison and death follows in 2d6 hours. A successful save ends the threat; after brief fever and nausea, the survivor is permanently immune.

Zurchins cling to asteroid reef rocks, eating dust, wood, organic scraps and leftover food that drifts into a rock's gravity plane, often among colonies of drifting reef organisms.

Under the spines lies a 40-part mouth whose hard teeth bore through wood, stone and even iron over hours or days, carving hideouts and mating dens.

A female has 10 to 20 quills holding thousands of tiny eggs. A hit from one deals only impact damage, no poison, but has a 5% chance to implant. Over a week the host loses appetite, grows confused and itches madly, then is paralyzed and suffocates; hatchlings eat the corpse and each other. Cure disease destroys the eggs. Lodged in a wooden or organic starship hull, eggs take two weeks, and some small dragonfly-hulled starships have collapsed far from any reef, leaving only the starhelm and a few hundred zurchins.

Rich web-eel slavers relish the flesh, normally lethal to them, for its danger. Feuding clans of slaver cooks, the white sashes, guard secret detoxifying methods that usually work, and pay well enough that poor starhelm pilots risk harvesting zurchins. Firebirds also eat them.