Artificial beaver dams saw juvenile coho salmon survival rates go from 8% to 60% (discoverwildlife.com)
199 points by speckx 13 hours ago
_whiteCaps_ 8 hours ago
There's a really good book about a homesteader that did something similar to this in the 1930's in British Columbia, "Three Against The Wilderness". Basically he restored the dams that had been dynamited by the ranchers, and that restored all of the wetlands in the area.
Later on, the government brought him some beavers from elsewhere, and they flourished.
Waterluvian 4 hours ago
I love this. Especially the part where you can ask the Government of Canada for beavers.
But it feels like there’s a bit of surprise to the idea that the environment takes on the form it takes on. And if you take away a part of it, it’ll take on a different form. And if you put that part back, it can take on the earlier form. There is no correct or canonical form.
usedtobegood 2 hours ago
There are lots of people looking to relocate beavers as their dams flood out roads etc. I can get you about 6 a year
StanislavPetrov 2 hours ago
Waterluvian 2 hours ago
adrianN 2 hours ago
While its true that there are no correct or canonical forms for the environment, there are states with large biodiversity and states with comparatively small biodiversity. Generally we regard the former more valuable than the latter.
richiebful1 9 hours ago
It was an interesting, but counterintuitive result that water temperatures went down after artificial beaver damming. Their theory is that the water is able to permeate more into the ground and exchange heat with the ambient underground temperature [1]
1. https://www.science.org/content/article/beaver-dams-without-...
reilly3000 4 hours ago
I’m rather partial to beavers myself and was sad to learn about their demise in North America. At one point their pelts were referred to as “the coin of the realm” https://youtu.be/8XToPq9lsOM?si=DJKedkQXuzJhSmf7
culi 3 hours ago
Here's your link without the surveillance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XToPq9lsOM
I'd recommend Leila Philip's Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America. It's a great work of narrative science writing.
I think we deeply underestimate the profound impact beavers had on the landscape in North America. We truly live in a post-beaver geography. The beaver hat fad in Europe was the primary driver of their population going from hundreds of millions to less than 100,000.
eureka7 3 hours ago
off-topic: I've made a habit of removing all those `si` or `igshid` or `unique_share_id` (thanks airbnb for making it obvious, I guess) and I wish I'd have a "middleware" that removes them when I copy something, but I'm too lazy and it would not be cross-platform.
some apps have gotten sneaky though and made every shared URL an apparently unique one :/
culi 3 hours ago
josefresco 10 hours ago
Maybe I missed it, why didn't they just reintroduce beavers?
petcat 9 hours ago
The beavers are still there, just not in high numbers like they used to be. Right now the ecosystem can only support the population that is already there. Maybe eventually it will support more and then the number will increase naturally.
cornstalks 9 hours ago
TFA implies the issue is land owners won’t allow it:
> But beavers can only thrive if landowners allow them to.
repeekad 9 hours ago
Which they never will on their own, so surely conservation regulations need to be enforced, too bad the US is moving backwards right now in that regard
stouset 9 hours ago
cmrdporcupine 8 hours ago
Beavers can be incredibly difficult to live alongside of.
My parents have 100+ acres of bush in central Alberta. When they bought the property it was logged out and mostly in a bad abused state and mostly dry. Over a few years, beavers moved in and transformed a formerly semi-marshy spot into a full pond. And then another. And another.
Eventually though, without a lot of predators around (there's some skittish bears, coyotes, that's it) they begin to overpopulate. And any efforts to keep the water level at a certain point starts to get tricky. In order to keep access to some parts of the property my dad ended up having to put in some sneaky culverts with various tricks to stop them from plugging them. (I forget, but he eventually figured out a beaverproof trick).
Even then, every few years the need to "remove" some of the beavers, because they just get to be too many, they run out of poplars near their lodge and start to cause more problems for downstream and upstream neighbours.
They've done amazing things for the property. But when my parents pass it's going to be hard to maintain this property with the beavers actively trying to transform it constantly.
xandrius 7 hours ago
tosapple 7 hours ago
arthurbrown 7 hours ago
cogogo 8 hours ago
parodysbird 6 hours ago
evan_ 7 hours ago
this is basically the inciting incident of the recent movie Hoppers
cucumber3732842 8 hours ago
Because the government makes the water that comes with them a huge liability.
Tons of vacant land owners would be happy to allow beavers and everything else if not for the fact that it destroys any prospect of doing anything on the land.
devilbunny 4 hours ago
pvaldes 9 hours ago
> Maybe I missed it, why didn't they just reintroduce beavers?
My guess is that trees are not there in numbers enough to support beavers. Or maybe they don't want beavers chopping the trees.
krm01 8 hours ago
Whatever they eat, did that go down to an all time low. Im m curious about the chain reaction vs an isolated result.
rmunn 3 hours ago
That was my thought too. Nothing in an ecosystem exists in isolation. Change a single variable, especially a dramatic change like going from 8% to 60% on a single variable, and there will be ripple effects throughout the local ecosystem. The Law of Unintended Consequences is one of those unchangeable, eternal laws that when you forget them, the Gods of the Copybook Headings limp up to explain it once more*.
* https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm for anyone who doesn't recognize the reference in that last sentence. Most people will, I hope, but there's always the lucky 10,000. (https://xkcd.com/1053/)
xp84 3 hours ago
I really want this to mean dams constructed by robot beavers. Move over, A.I.! Time for A.B.
pstuart 9 hours ago
With freshwater increasingly being a problem, being able to slow down tributaries and allow the water to percolate and help rebuild aquifers is something that should be happening everywhere possible.
Lost cost, high reward. Not sexy enough to get the attention it deserves.
declan_roberts 8 hours ago
The temperature is cooler? That can't possibly be the only reason to explain such a dramatic change in survival rates. We definitely need more research on this topic.
oatmeal1 6 hours ago
There's more food, less energy wasted fighting excessively strong current, and more places to hide from predators. Water quality goes up downstream of a beaver(-ish) dam.
margalabargala 8 hours ago
If you do even a moment of reading about salmon, you will find that they are extremely sensitive to warm temperatures. Even a couple degrees F above their "normal" will allow disease to run rampant.
declan_roberts 8 hours ago
I give the salmon a little more credit because the entire river can't be a beaver dam. That's their theory and I think will more research we're going to learn more about what's happening here.
tomcam 9 hours ago
I am sick of underachieving beavers. Go us! Seriously, that would require statutory change here in Washington state. I live in a rural area with salmon waterways all over. Farmers just quietly clear the way for them, because it's illegal to make any changes to the waterway even if it's trash thrown out of cars.
tolugenius 8 hours ago
> I am sick of underachieving beavers. Go us!
This really made laugh for some reason, just imagining a beaver typing away at HN specifically.
rmunn 3 hours ago
And probably playing Timberborn on a second monitor at the same time.
analog8374 5 hours ago
we clearly need to design better salmon.
lotrjohn 4 hours ago
Been there. Done that. Even attended the “spawn till you die” festival in ‘98 but all I got was a stupid t-shirt.