Such weird beaver news today. To start with there is a new research article proudly touting that trained sniff dogs can spot the difference between castor fiber and castor canadensis. As if that as an important role that just needed filling?

Scent-sniffing dogs can discriminate between native Eurasian and invasive North American beavers

The invasion of a species can cause population reduction or extinction of a similar native species due to replacement competition. There is a potential risk that the native Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber) may eventually be competitively excluded by the invasive North American beaver (C. canadensis) from areas where they overlap in Eurasia. Yet currently available methods of census and population estimates are costly and time-consuming. In a laboratory environment, we investigated the potential of using dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) as a conservation tool to determine whether the Eurasian or the North American beaver is present in a specific beaver colony. We hypothesized that dogs can discriminate between the two beaver species, via the odorant signal of castoreum from males and females, in two floor platform experiments. We show that dogs detect scent differences between the two species, both from dead beaver samples and from scent marks collected in the field. Our results suggest that dogs can be used as an “animal biosensor” to discriminate olfactory signals of beaver species, however more tests are needed. Next step should be to test if dogs discern between beaver species in the field under a range of weather conditions and habitat types and use beaver samples collected from areas where the two species share the same habitat. So far, our results show that dogs can be used as a promising tool in the future to promote conservation of the native beaver species and eradication of the invasive one. We therefore conclude that dogs may be an efficient non-invasive tool to help;

Hmm. Has there ever been a paper that claimed that American beavers were out chewing or outdamming their european counterparts? I mean I’ve seen plenty that prove that the pair can’t interbreed. And some that claim that American beavers build bigger dams. But do they actually compete? Probably not.

I’d be more interested in whether beaver scent marking intended for castor fiber translates to castor canadensis, so to speak.

Of course what they’re interested in is the word INVASIVE which means “We get to kill it”. There are laws in the EU about killing beavers but you can kill invasive species with free reign. Now dogs can help them do it more.

Our results, taken with the broader literature, confirm that dogs can be used as an “animal biosensor” in a laboratory setting to discriminate between scent samples from similar species (same genus) of many different taxa. Our study results show that dogs can be used as a promising tool to promote conservation of the native beaver species and eradication of the invasive one.

Yay?

Okay the beaver news gets even weirder because I was asked to tell folks that this will be happening this week, at the wednesday night  winter meeting. A Thousand Friends of Martinez is an environmental-civic group that does a lot of good for the city, mostly in opposition to really bad ideas the city leaders have on their own. Jon’s accepting it for me on behalf of beaver friends everywhere.

Let me just say that if you feed orphans or sell tickets to the chamber of commerce mixer you might get named woman of the year by the city of Martinez. If, on the other hand, you are a huge pain in the city’s ass doing something that is ultimately good for them but they don’t want, like saving beavers or demanding redistricting, you get named “Citizen of the year” by Thousand Friends of Martinez.

Call it the civic underground.