Credit: UT Jackson School of Geosciences/ National Center for Health Statistics/ USDA Forest Service.
A new species of ancient beaver that was rediscovered by researchers in The University of Texas at Austin’s fossil collections has been named after Buc-ee’s, a Texas-based chain of popular travel centers known for its cartoon beaver mascot. The beaver is called Anchitheriomys buceei, or “A. buceei” for short. Steve May, a research associate at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences, said that the beaver’s Texas connection and a chance encounter with a Buc-ee’s billboard are what inspired the name.
May is the lead author of the paper that describes A. buceei, along with another, much smaller, species of fossil beaver. Published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, the paper provides an overview of beaver occurrences along the Texas Gulf Coast from 15 million to 22 million years ago based on bones and archival records in the UT collections.
While driving down a highway in 2020, May spotted a Buc-ee’s billboard that said “This is Beaver Country.” The phrase brought to mind the Texas beaver fossils he had been studying at UT’s Texas Vertebrate Paleontology Collections.
“I thought, ‘Yeah, it is beaver country, and it has been for millions of years,'” May said.
A. buceei lived in Texas about 15 million years ago. To the casual observer, it probably wouldn’t have looked much different from beavers living in Texas today, according to study co-author Matthew Brown, the director of the Jackson School’s vertebrate paleontology collections. However, one key difference is size. A. buceei was bigger—about 30% larger than modern beavers—though still much smaller than the bear-size beavers that lived in North America during the last Ice Age.
The UT collections includes A. buceei fossils from six Texas sites. But most of what researchers know about the new fossil beaver comes from a unique partial skull from Burkeville, Texas. The fossil is a fusion of bone and brain cast that was created when sediment naturally seeped into the beaver’s brain cavity eons ago, creating a rock replica of the brain as the specimen fossilized.
See the rest of the article. And there is another bit of news on PHYS-ORG that might lessen concerns about the greenhouse gas produced in wetlands.
Annual mean near-surface air temperature response to methane, decomposed into (a) longwave and shortwave effects; (b) longwave effects only; and (c) shortwave effects only. Credit: Robert Allen/UCR
Most climate models do not yet account for a new UC Riverside discovery: methane traps a great deal of heat in Earth’s atmosphere, but also creates cooling clouds that offset 30% of the heat. Greenhouse gases like methane create a kind of blanket in the atmosphere, trapping heat from Earth’s surface, called longwave energy, and preventing it from radiating out into space. This makes the planet hotter.
“A blanket doesn’t create heat, unless it’s electric. You feel warm because the blanket inhibits your body’s ability to send its heat into the air. This is the same concept,” explained Robert Allen, UCR assistant professor of Earth sciences.
In addition to absorbing longwave energy, it turns out methane also absorbs incoming energy from the sun, known as shortwave energy. “This should warm the planet,” said Allen, who led the research project. “But counterintuitively, the shortwave absorption encourages changes in clouds that have a slight cooling effect.”
This effect is detailed in the journal Nature Geoscience, alongside a second finding that the research team did not fully expect. Though methane generally increases the amount of precipitation, accounting for the absorption of shortwave energy suppresses that increase by 60%.
Both types of energy—longwave (from Earth) and shortwave (from sun)—escape from the atmosphere more than they are absorbed into it. The atmosphere needs compensation for the escaped energy, which it gets from heat created as water vapor condenses into rain, snow, sleet, or hail.
“Essentially, precipitation acts as a heat source, making sure the atmosphere maintains a balance of energy,” said study co-author Ryan Kramer, a researcher at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Methane changes this equation. By holding on to energy from the sun, methane is introducing heat the atmosphere no longer needs to get from precipitation.
Additionally, methane shortwave absorption decreases the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface. This in turn reduces the amount of water that evaporates. Generally, precipitation and evaporation are equal, so a decrease in evaporation leads to a decrease in precipitation.
“This has implications for understanding in more detail how methane and perhaps other greenhouses gases can impact the climate system,” Allen said. “Shortwave absorption softens the overall warming and rain-increasing effects but does not eradicate them at all.”
. . .
Scientific interest in methane has increased in recent years as levels of emissions have increased. Much comes from industrial sources, as well as from agricultural activities and landfill. Methane emissions are also likely to increase as frozen ground underlying the Arctic begins to thaw.
Regardless of our contribution to the atmosphere, as the first article shows, we beaver folks have been at this for a very long time. It’s your recent behavior that’s causing the problems! Check out the report.
Researchers in Poland have found another reason to love beavers: They benefit wintering birds.
The rodents, once maligned as destructive pests, have been getting a lot of positive press lately. And for good reason. Beavers are ecosystem engineers. As they gather trees and dam waterways, they create wetlands, increase soil moisture, and allow more light to reach the ground. That drives the growth of herbaceous and shrubby vegetation, which benefits numerous animals.
Bats, who enjoy the buffet of insects found along beaver ponds, are among the beneficiaries. So too are butterflies who come for the diversity of flowering plants in the meadows beavers create.
Some previous research has found that this helping hand also extends to birds. For example, a 2008 study in the western United States showed that the vegetation that grows along beaver-influenced streams provided needed habitat for migratory songbirds, many of whom are in decline.
A beaver dam in Bierbza Marshes, Poland. Photo: Francesco Veronesi (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The new study published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management found further evidence by focusing on birds in winter. The researchers looked at assemblages of wintering birds on 65 beaver sites and 65 reference sites in a range of temperate forest habitat across Poland. Winter can be a challenging time for birds in that environment, as they need to reduce energy expenditures in the cold weather and find habitat that has high-quality food and roosting sites.
Wintering birds, it turns out, find those qualities near beaver habitat.
The researchers found a greater abundance of birds and more species richness near areas where beavers had modified waterways. Both were highest closest to the shores of beaver ponds.
“All beaver-induced modifications of the existing habitat may have influence on bird assemblage,” says Michal Ciach, a study co-author and a professor in the department of Forest Biodiversity at the University of Agriculture in Krakow, Poland. “But different bird species may rely on different habitat traits that emerge due to beaver activity. It’s like a supermarket.”
The Eurasian beaver. Photo: Per Harald Olsen/NTNU (CC BY 2.0)
The growing research about beavers suggests a greater need to protect their habitat and understand their important role in the ecosystem.
“Beaver sites should be treated as small nature reserves,” says Ciach. “The beaver, like no other species, is our ally in stopping the decline of biodiversity.”
The City of St. Albert is upping its engineering-ante in an ongoing duel with the local beaver population by installing some new water infrastructure safeguards over the next few years.
The City of St. Albert plans to add a couple of new tools to its water-management tool belt over the next few years to counteract problems caused by the local beaver population.
Melissa Logan, the city’s environmental coordinator, said staff will install pond levellers in high-priority spots throughout Carrot Creek and the Sturgeon River, starting this summer.
Unbeknownst to the estimated 16 individual beavers who call these rivers home, pond levellers allow water to flow through dams to prevent flooding, Logan said.
“The pond levellers you can put right in the middle of a dam and it will keep the water flowing through so that we don’t get flooding, but still allow the beaver to create some of the habitat that it needs,” she said.
“It’s just a method of coexisting with beavers on the landscape instead of getting rid of them entirely.”
City staff are getting some new tools to counteract regular infrastructure damage caused by the estimated 16 local beavers. FILE/Photo
“Best-case scenario is that beavers are still able to be active on the landscape and do their natural water management,” Logan said of what she hopes the new tools will accomplish.
“Protection of our infrastructure in the long term is really what we’re looking for.”
Logan said staff will install the tools in high-priority areas this summer, and in lower priority areas over the next few years.
Major cost savings
Glynnis Hood, an environmental biology and ecology professor at the University of Alberta’s Augustana campus in Camrose and author of The Beaver Manifesto (2011), told The Gazette she has seen pond levellers save municipalities thousands of dollars.
“There’s cost savings, there’s ecological advantages, (and) there’s infrastructure advantages for reducing maintenance needs,” said Hood.
“For instance, in Cooking Lake-Blackfoot, we installed about 13 (pond levellers) and then we monitored them over seven years. The maintenance that was required … was maybe pull a few sticks out here and there and they worked really well,” she said.
“The cost savings was in the tens of thousands of dollars, and if we added on some other economic drivers … it could even be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars of cost savings just for those 13 sites that otherwise have been chronically flooded for over 10 years.”
Hood said pond levellers, culvert protectors, and other beaver-damage mitigation can improve how people in the community view their neighbourhood beavers.
Beavers as extreme-weather mitigators
As part of an ongoing five-year project, Hood and Dr. Cherie Westbrook from the University of Saskatchewan are studying how beavers and their dams might help mitigate extreme climate events, such as floods and droughts.
“Over 60 per cent of the beaver dams actually held even in the 2013 flood that devastated Calgary and downstream areas,” she said. “Many of the beaver dams were only partially breached or didn’t breach at all.”
“They actually played a role in holding back some of that floodwater or at least delayed or slowed its downstream flow.”
Hood said it’s too early to say definitively if beaver dams could be a significant tool during extreme-weather events in Alberta, but current data and modelling looks promising.
“In climate change, you’re going to get more extreme-weather events, like these big rainfall events, but you’re also going to get drought, and beavers (might) play a role in a natural and nature-based solution for some of these things.”
To learn more about beavers and, as Logan described, their unmatched water management engineering ability, Hood was recently featured in a TED-Talk YouTube video.
The recent winter storms on the Central Coast didn’t just affect humans — they’ve also damaged the habitat of the local beaver population.
Audrey Taub is the Executive Director of the SLO Beaver Brigade, who describe themselves as “beaver advocates.” It’s a group of local biologists, science enthusiasts and community members who educate people about the rodents and the role they play in our ecosystem.
While talking and teaching about beavers is often a joyful experience, Taub said there has been some sad news recently about local beaver populations.
“The big rains pretty much washed everything out. This particular storm definitely displaced them,” Taub said.
“We found one dead juvenile. So they really can’t live on their own until they’re at least two. So these one-year-olds just didn’t have a chance.”
The SLO Beaver Brigade helped paint, “The Beaver Mural” on a local coffee shop they meet at once a week.
Taub said after the heavy rain, local beavers will have to rebuild their dams in places like streams and ponds. She said it’s not clear how long that will take, but she’s “excited for the whole community to watch the ponds develop,” Taub said.
Beavers play a major role in fighting climate change by building dams, which helps create and restore wetlands.
That’s important, because it’s estimated that globally, wetlands can store about 190 million cars’ worth of emissions every year.
Cooper Lienhart is the SLO Beaver Brigade’s Restorations Director.
“I used to think we would engineer our way out of the problem and make synthetic trees to suck CO2 back out of the atmosphere. But yeah, I learned that wetlands are [the] most efficient land ecosystem at absorbing and storing CO2,” Lienhart said.
Last week the SLO Beaver Brigade received the California Coastal Commission’s WHALE TAIL grant. Taub and Lienhart said the money will be used to offer educational tours, river cleanups, and translations for Spanish-speakers interested in learning about beavers.
More information on the emissions-fighting rodents is online at slobeaverbrigade.com.
Read the whole article here.
And there is more news from the SLO Beaver Brigade: The First Annual SLO County Beaver Festival!
Beaver Festival Info:
The SLO Beaver Brigade invites eager beavers of all ages to the First Annual SLO County Beaver Festival on Saturday April 1 in SLO Mission Plaza from 10 am to 3 pm. Kids are welcome and encouraged to come learn about beavers with us! The festival will be a celebration of our local beavers with live music, speakers, food and drink, educational displays, crafts and games, and local booths
Why do we celebrate beavers? Because we see them as climate change superheroes! Beavers build dams in our creeks and rivers, turning them into lush wetlands. This SLOWS the water down, allowing it to SPREAD out and SINK into our aquifers (slow it, spread it, sink it)! Not only does this help us in droughts, but their wetlands also create refuge from wildfires. Come join us on April 1st to learn about all this and more at our first ever SLO Beaver Festival.
And for the last bit of news, there is a very lively and informative interview with Ben Goldfarb by Taya Jae at The Pen and The Sword.
Beavers have been touted as an efficient and natural climate change mitigator
I’d say that beavers are PROVEN to be excellent at repairing riparian systems that we have damaged and if we work along with them and decide not to keep doing things that harm the environment, the climate will soon began to improve for all.
Great talk by Ecologist Mark Beardsley on process based river restoration on Sarah Koenigsberg’s Vimeo site:
Beavers have put up with a lot over the years: near extermination, being called all kind of names, lies that they kill salmon or eat salmon or compete with salmon. They’ve been dropped out of airplanes and helicopters even when people thought they mattered. Meanwhile otters have sprung back from the fur trade being called cute and athletic, Even fishermen stop what they’re doing to watch otters frolic, Even when they hate them. It’s not fair in any way, considering who does all the work that makes all those fish ponds that the otters enjoy in the first place,
So you have to forgive beavers (and me) for enjoying the thinnest slice of Schadenfreude in the past 24 hours where headlines like these have been falling like thick snowflakes.
An otter is suspected to have killed two beaver kits released at Loch Lomond last month. The kits, along with their parents and three siblings, were relocated from Tayside to a nature reserve as part of efforts to boost biodiversity.
The dead beavers and an otter were spotted on remote camera footage last week.Conservationists said a post-mortem examination had confirmed an otter had preyed on one of the kits.
Well of course the post mortem could show kits in their stomachs but they couldn’t actually prove the otter killed them. I mean anything might have happened and the otter just swam up to investigate and gotten lucky. and nibbled the spoils. I mean be honest, it’s not OTTER CSI we don’t know for sure what took place. But it’s a reasonable assumption. They do attack pelicans and baby ducks, I’ve been seeing headlines like “Otters attack” and “Killer otters” for days now and all I am sure that every fish in the world is reading those headlines thinking, “MMM….And how cute are they now?”
The world is temporarily out of balance. Don’t fret, it will right itself soon enough. Let’s just turn the page and see what challenges beavers are facing now, shall we?
I was recently pouring through decades of beaver harvest data, trying to map where people had harvested beaver on the refuge and where they had not. This historical data is one piece of a complex puzzle in predicting current and future distribution on the landscape.
As a biologist, I feel that one of our strongest traits is pattern recognition, which was in full force as I input years of harvest data. With every name, I could visualize times I had been to almost every spot.
Even when the harvest report had the wrong name or spelling, I remembered doing a bird or vegetation survey nearby. The patterns continued year after year until I came to a name I had never noticed, Ootka Lake.
What a cool name, and why do I not know where it is? I started old school and scanned my paper maps to no avail. Next, I used my trusty electronic device and found Ootka Lake in the Beaver Creek Drainage near Akula Lake.
I had to know more about it.
As I looked at the map and traced the water back through the drainage, I also realized there was very little geological or topographical reason for a lake in the middle of these vast wetland-stream complexes.
There may or may not be beavers there now, but it seems apparent as I backtracked up “Beaver” Creek that these lakes were at one time formed by some of nature’s most energetic engineers.
There was no geological explanation for a lake there. Some other culprit must be to blame. Beavers are afoot! Call in Mr. Holmes at once, maybe he can get to the bottom of this.
At some point, I will have to find my way to the downstream side of Q’alts’ih Bena and see if there is an active beaver dam. Or is the history of that well-constructed dam buried under the lakeshore sediments and leaf detritus?
The picture in my mind of beavers dragging birch limbs down to the water’s edge may not be present, but somewhere buried in that lakeshore is a history of how a small creek was temporarily blocked, filling the valley with water, and then continued to flow down to the Kenai River and how that slow meandering creek and wetland were transformed into a small lake that continues as a place today.
What a treat to know the Dena’ina had already discovered the history of this place and named it long before the timeline of the beaver harvest records in front of me.
As our climate continues to change, concerns have surfaced about warming waterways and potential impacts on salmon. Some of my colleagues have been looking at where water in nonglacial streams similar to Beaver Creek originates and what influences the water temperature throughout the season.
Because I just THOUGHT it so it must be true. Beavers must warm ponds and kill salmon. Never mind all that research saying that dams actually cause hyporheic exchange that ends up COOLING the waters. Because science is hard to read and makes my head hurt.
Since there are no glaciers affecting water quantity and temperature in this system, we can narrow inputs down to snow melt, rain, artesian upwelling and wetlands. The lakes hold water and slowly release stored water like a sponge.
In some situations, temporary flooding from a well-placed beaver dam could be the catalyst that wets the surrounding spongy wetland. It is actually feasible that throughout a warm, dry climatic period, inputs like artesian upwelling and slow-released water from wetlands might be the temperature-stabilizing influence these creeks need to remain viable for salmon and other habitat components they need.
When I see things like fire, insect outbreaks and drought can change landscapes, I am stumped at why I never put beavers in the same category. Without more study, we can only speculate, but the influences of one family of beaver could be far-reaching. The obvious storage of water in a lake is the low-hanging fruit in this story.
Time and future research will hopefully shed light on the function of beavers on our landscape previously, today and into the future. But, for now, my daydream of visiting Q’alts’ih Bena must be put on hold as there are 10 more years of data to input and five other outstanding reports to be finished before the summer field season arrives.
Yeah it might turn out that beavers are actually helping things by making these spongy wetlands but we don;’t know for sure. It could be a fluke, They could be a cancer, spreading across the tundra and wreaking havoc. Better spend more money on research just to be sure.
Happy Valentine’s eve. I’ve been getting ready for a pod cast interview on Tuesday. I was contacted by Jeanne Rosenmeier, one of the hosts if Linksploration at the beginning of the month to discuss the beavers in Martinez, how beavers in general could matter in the Bay Area and the way that they can mitigate the effects of Climate Change. The podcast drops once a month and is specifically dedicated to the Diablo Valley and the wider Bay Area which makes it kind of cool and locally specific.
Jeanne said she was encouraged to contact me because of the presentation I gave to Alameda Fisheries a while ago, which was a nice surprise. That had been a fairly frustrating talk to the mostly beaver-wary so I’m delighted to think something positive came out of it. After I listened to it I suggested she also invite Mitch Avalon, formerly a deputy supervisor at Flood Control and on the beaver subcommittee with me. Mitch has since grandfathered into a consultant from the county and started his own creek consulting business. He became somewhat of a believer in his own right I’d say over the years. He also has way more hydrological clout than I ever hope to muster so I’m thinking he will reach some ears I couldn’t.
Anyway that’s on Tuesday but it won’t air right away, I’ll let you know when it is ready to hear. For now we can all relax and imagine that someday the Bay Area will be ready for beavers instead of just ready to trap them. Along those lines, this was a nicely zen way to start my morning, and I’m hoping it warms yours too.
See the rest of the article. And there is another bit of news on PHYS-ORG that might lessen concerns about the greenhouse gas produced in wetlands.
