I’m so excited to tell you how wrong I’ve been.
For years now I’ve been following the data we had from the very beginning when we were told by so many experts that beavers live 10-15 years. I’ve been very devoted to that fact because I felt it made people less afraid of the beaver “breeding machine”. I remember friendly reporter Joe Eaton wrote in the article about Mom beaver’s death that the record of the longest living beaver was 19 years in captivity and of course we all considered that a fluke.
I assumed that our Dad beaver was around 11 and at the end of his life when he left us. I knew a colony had been studied at Mountain View Sanitation 10 years before our beavers came and always always figured that was ancient history and at least one of our beavers had descended from them.
I was WRONG.
Yesterday in Emily’s water interview she casually mentioned that beavers live up to 25 years. This was so outside our information that I wrote her to ask about it. She sent back a host of articles on the subject. Apparently beaver are study for LONGEVITY research because they live so long for a rodent.
In fact the only rodent that lives longer than the beaver is the Naked mole rat in Africa.
Now in addition to my wrongness, this is remarkable because we of course know that beavers are awesome for a host of other reasons. But to think that cancer researchers are amazed by their anti-aging abilities is wonderous in a hole new way. Apparently the Longevity of a beaver has been studied and attributed to three things: 
Their ability to repair their own DNA when disease strikes, their ability to exert dynamic change on the atoms around them, and their enormous adaptability and capacity to resist stress. Beavers, and you know this but they know it on a cellular level, really don’t stress the small stuff.
Beaver and Naked Mole Rat Genomes Reveal Common Paths to Longevity
Long-lived rodents have become an attractive model for the studies on aging. To understand evolutionary paths to long life, we prepare chromosome-level genome assemblies of the two longest-lived rodents, Canadian beaver (Castor canadensis) and naked mole rat (NMR, Heterocephalus glaber), which were scaffolded with in vitro proximity ligation and chromosome conformation capture data and complemented with long-read sequencing. Our comparative genomic analyses reveal that amino acid substitutions at “disease-causing” sites are widespread in the rodent genomes and that identical substitutions in long-lived rodents are associated with common adaptive phenotypes, e.g., enhanced resistance to DNA damage and cellular stress. By employing a newly developed substitution model and likelihood ratio test, we find that energy and fatty acid metabolism pathways are enriched for signals of positive selection in both long-lived rodents. Thus, the high-quality genome resource of long-lived rodents can assist in the discovery of genetic factors that control longevity and adaptive evolution.
I would point out that the beaver diet relies so greatly on willow which is known to be one of the most regrowing and to stimulate regrowth. In fact willow is used as a rooting compound and it clearly has passed on its magic over the years. Robin of Napa also pointed out that beavers have a surprising ability to not only resist pollutants (such as in Chernobyl) but to transform them! Making toxins into cleaner brighter less toxic versions of themselves.
To think about this momentous way in which I had misunderstood the beaver lifecycle was startling, But of course it also meant I had to rethink OUR beavers lifecycle. I had always thought our father beaver was descended from the nearby MVSD colony.
Now I think it was him the whole time. He came to Alhambra Creek for his second act, as it were. The study in MVSD took place in 1997, just a decade before dad showed up downtown. I thought he was a child when he came. but now I’m thinking that he was around 11 or 12.
To say that this blew all of my mind yesterday is an understatement. The idea that our father beaver had a family and home a decade before was every bit as shocking as if I had found out that my own father had had another wife, another family another life before I was born. This changes everything because it means that dad was so much larger because he was older than mom. And that mom was such a sweet young thing, which might explain why she was always more able to tolerate people than Dad, who valued his privacy.
Was mom from MVSD too? Was she a relative? Did they meet in his explorations? We cannot know. But we do know this:
Beavers live longer than >23 years. They are way cooler than mole rats. Dad’s first chapter was probably in MVSD and his second in Alhambra creek. And suggests that in his long life he was probably married three times.
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Riverside Preserve in Northern Fauquier County offers a great place to put a line in the Rappahannock River. Nestled off Leeds Manor Road near Orlean, the preserve is donated land now managed by Fauquier Parks and Recreation and is the only county park with access to the Rappahannock.
This article was recently published in the Oregon State science magazine. It’s beautifully written by Katherine Bolesky, and the opening paragraphs transported me to a magical place. I hope you go read the whole thing and appreciate her fully.
Canada started after OSU, but had more resources and required less money. Genome sequencing is built into their infrastructure, and so they only needed about $20,000. Our star beaver was named Filbert, a resident of the Oregon Zoo. Canada’s beaver was named Ward. After these two lovely beavers donated some blood, the race was on. Canada ended up winning, by a single day! Dr. Blair said, “It was really funny, depending on what country you were in, in the U.S it was like ‘Oregon State publishes the genome’, no mention of Toronto, and Toronto was like ‘We beat Oregon!’” It ended up being beneficial to have both countries sequence the genome, because they were able to compare and correct mistakes that were made. It turns out that beavers have less base sequences than humans, but share 60% of their genome with us.
The castoides skull copy is one our most prized beaver exhibit items. For years we’ve been answering questions about this dinosaur beaver, reporting the slightly incredible research based on isotope analysis that they didn’t eat trees but survived on very small pond weed. People always scoff at that, and say then what are those big teeth for? Which I can never explain.
By studying the wood-cutting behaviour of ancient beavers that once roamed the Canadian high Arctic, an international team of scientists has discovered that tree predation – feeding on trees and harvesting wood – evolved in these now-extinct rodents long before dam-building.
