Maybe it’s time to stop asking.
When big things happen it’s usually because people made them happen. Erin Brockovich didn’t win by asking PGE to be please be nicer and stop putting chemicals in the soil. I say its high time beavers lawyered-up and sued the feds for failing the public trust over and over again. Beavers would help us and they’re not letting them even though scientist after scientist is proving why they matter.
This article just pushed me over the edge. What are we fucking waiting for?
The beaver facilitates species richness and abundance of terrestrial and semi-aquatic mammals
Beavers are ecosystem engineers which are capable to facilitate many groups of organisms. However, their facilitation of mammals has been little studied. We applied two methods, camera trapping and snow track survey to investigate the facilitation of a mammalian community by the ecosystem engineering of the American beaver (Castor canadensis) in a boreal setting.
What an interesting study! These researchers used camera traps and tracks in the snow to see if their were more MAMMALS at beaver ponds. Gee aren’t you curious about what they found? Isn’t that a total STUMPER.
We found that both mammalian species richness (83% increase) and occurrence (12% increase) were significantly higher in beaver patches than in the controls. Of individual species, the moose (Alces alces) used beaver patches more during both the ice-free season and winter. The Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra), the pine marten (Martes martes) and the least weasel (Mustela nivalis) made more use of beaver sites during the winter. Our study highlights the role of ecosystem engineers in promoting species richness and abundance, especially in areas of relatively low productivity. Wetlands and their species have been in drastic decline during the past century, and promoting facilitative ecosystem engineering by beaver is feasible in habitat conservation or restoration. Beaver engineering may be especially valuable in landscapes artificially deficient in wetlands.
MORE MOOSE. MORE OTTER. MORE WEASELS. OF course there fucking were. Of course there was more activity at a beaver than at your beaverless control station. They came for food. They came because there were holes in the ice and they were looking for fish. They came because there was more vegetation. They came to eat all the other animals that came to the area.
OF COURSE THERE WERE.
From the aspect of habitat conservation or restoration, it is feasible to identify beavers as facilitators and to promote their populations (Byers et al., 2006), since restoration is especially needed in wetlands due to the loss of 60–90% of these habitats in Europe (Junk et al., 2013). Beavers can be especially valuable in landscapes artificially deficient of wetlands and lacking processes naturally driving heterogeneity (Willby et al., 2018). Many organisms have benefited from beaver-created productivity coupled with an increase of suitable habitat structures (Rosell et al., 2005; Stringer and Gaywood, 2016), both of which affected mammalian diversity and activity at the patch level in our study.
I’m done asking nice. We DESERVE beavers. We deserve water and salmon and wildlife and wood duck and otter. We deserve healthy streams free of nitrates and other pollutants. And we deserve to have access to good clean water all year long.
It’s time to stop asking.
