Engineers say that Benny’s amazing
Building dams of incredible strength
And his front teeth are worthy of praising
Growing to an incredible length
Sung to “Red River Valley“
If you’ll remember way back to 2015 (when we all still had health care and social security), you might recall that Oregon State did a crowd funding to raise funds for sequencing a beaver genome. In January. Canada bragged that it was doing one for its 150th anniversary, but when I sent the top researcher news of this, she replied to me, too late! We already did!
Beavers fill big genes, and OSU wins bragging rights
The North American beaver, Oregon State University’s mascot animal, has 26,200 genes in its genetic code — about 33 percent more inheritable information than humans have, OSU researchers say.
The scientists know this because a fall 2015 crowd-funding drive brought in a total of $20,001 from 103 donors that OSU used to pay for a gene sequencing study on the beaver.
The project took a blood sample from Filbert, a 5-year-old North American beaver that lives at the Portland Zoo, as a proxy for Benny the Beaver, the human-stuffed mascot that represents the university at football games and other events.
About 60 percent of beaver genes correspond with like human genes, OSU’s Pankaj Jaiswal said in a news release.
So in the age old argument about beaver nature versus beaver nurture can finally be laid to rest. The answer to the question “How much of dam building is learned and how much is instinctive?” is about ‘a third more than humans’. Which is about what I’d suspect after watching different beavers tackle the job for the past decade.
Some dam-makers are better than others, and all improve with practice. This fits with what we saw over the years. I’m glad they were able to complete the sequencing, although I still don’t know why beavers seem more human the other animals do or what gene is responsible for making humans so intolerant of them.
I comforted myself yesterday with some Bach combined with a favorite Ellen Wohl quote. It’s short and amazing music so please enjoy!
