Prickly night intruder causes chaos on I’m A Celebrity

RUMOURS of sabotage did the rounds when cameras started blacking-out in the South African jungle camp on I’m A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here.

RUMOURS of sabotage did the rounds when cameras started blacking out in the African jungle camp on I’m A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here!

But the culprit turned out to be a rogue porcupine wreaking havoc as it mistook fibre optic cables for dinner.

“We got the call from the control room that they had lost several cameras, once we looked into it we realised it was 10 cameras down,” the production’s technical manager Roy Callow told Sydney Confidential.

Porky caught on camera! Picture: Supplied

“This is the first time in four seasons we have had a total fibre cable outage and that's why we use the tougher Armoured cable to allow for bush use. As soon as we got the call everyone automatically went with a power failure as that tended to be the cause with previous systems. We then realised that all the cameras involved were on one fibre cable so resolved the issue by using spare lines. First we were suspecting a fallen tree or rock.”A closer inspection led producers to believe the culprit was a rodent of some type.

“We took the ‘Eco guys’ out who identified the footprints of a bushpig but on the tree root nearby the teeth marks of something smaller then we found some of the quills,” Callow explained.

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Callow and his team set up a camera trap and after a few days discovered a large spiky porcupine, which Confidential has nicknamed Porky, in the act of nibbling the cables.

“It was basically digging the tree roots in the ground around the cable to eat. Once we realised this was the case it became clear the it had chomped down on the tree root with cable in the way,” Callow said.

The solution was to lift the cables into the trees in the area.