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.
Then come back here and let’s talk about how we’re all 60% beaver!
Busy as a Beaver: Scientists Sequence the Animal’s Genome
One of the species to have its genome sequenced was the beaver, specifically, CastorCanadensis. In fact, it was one of the few species to have been sequenced without having disease or food connections.
Sequencing the Beaver Genome
Dr. Blair then described the actual sequencing of the beaver genome, which turns out to be a pretty spectacular science story. It cost $30,000 to sequence the beaver genome here in the United States. It was a crowdsource campaign, meaning all of the money was raised through donations. Oregon State University headed the project , and after about a year raised enough money. There was, however, a problem. The beaver is the Canadian beaver, and for their 150th year of independence Canada wanted to sequence the beaver genome first. Dr. Blair says it was like the space race!
I remember how amazing it was to read about the genome project at OSU and then read that Canada was doing the same thing for its anniversary. I wondered how they made such a similar plan with so little knowledge of each other. Clearly both organizations fail to read THIS WEBSITE everyday, which is a huge oversight.
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.
It’s funny to look back at our old article from 2017 and see how we were reporting this all at the time. In ”
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!
The article is dated July of this year. I really enjoyed her style of writing. Did you know humans and beavers share the same toe gene? Embryo toes are webbed in the uterus just like beavers, our gene just ‘turns off’ and the webbing disappears.
Scientists are also now wondering what part of a beaver’s genetic information tells it to build those spectacular dams that are so characteristic. Extinct beavers did not build dams, and so it is a new trait that has arisen. Scientists are hoping to figure out what that gene is, and why it tells the beavers to build those amazing habitats. Dr. Blair told me some beaver dams are so huge they can even be seen from space, the only such engineer besides humans on this planet.
Oooh now that’s interesting. What’s the dam gene? Now you got me curious. But it’s not all about genes, as we saw in Martinez.
Before ending our conversation, Dr. Blair told me her favorite beaver fact, which I never even considered. She said that “they have variations in behavior. We know humans have variations in behavior, we kind of assume animals are all the same, they’re all busy and all diligent, but I’ve been around beavers, and there are some that work harder than others. There’s incredible variation, I mean there are beavers that have bad attitudes. Not only are they sophisticated, they have not gone the route of other social animals, beavers have a lot more personality than we realize”. She even told me that, while doing field work, there was a beaver that would watch her work while munching on it’s lunch, and that some beavers spent much of their time eating while others were being busy beavers.
Well of COURSE. We saw hardworking beavers (like Reed) and smart working beavers (like GQ) and lazy-assed beavers (like the useless bookends). Also beavers that were extremely wary about working hard in front of you but would work like the devil if it was absolutely necessary. (Like Dad).
The Hawthorn effect doesn’t just apply to humans you know, sheesh.
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