Lets say, and why not, that long ago there was a vicious cabal loose in a New York city that as part of a get-rich-quick scheme released a megaton of noxious gasses into central park that was strong enough to kill every living thing in the area plus most of the state. And after a terrifying task force meeting the attending swat team, struggling to find a solution, came up with a magical freeze ray that would suspend the toxic gas in fumes over the tree line and there by allow people to be safe forever. Or almost forever.
In fact folks were so safe from the toxins that as years passed they forgot about them and no one even remembered how important the freeze ray was to their safety.
So no one was watching when the three year old came toddling in that for some reason turned off the freeze ray thus melting the toxins and releasting a cataclysm threatening everything in the area for miles around.
Do you think there would be news articles saying that the three year old had destroyed humanity and was more devastating than forest fires?
Beaver expansion into Alaska’s Arctic tundra presents problems for people, but also opportunities
Satellite images that have tracked beaver expansion over time clearly show not just the number of dams but their drastic impacts, said Ken Tape, the UAF ecology professor who is leading the A-BON program. He pointed to one site as an example. “It basically changes from a little stream into a sprawling wetlands,” he said.
The proliferation of beavers is attributed to the northward spread of woody plants that they eat and use for their dams and lodges.
While climate change has enabled beavers to live farther north, the animals are exacerbating the effects of Arctic climate change. Through their dam and lodge engineering, they are inundating some areas with water, speeding up permafrost thaw. Elsewhere, they are drying out areas.
Beavers can be as disruptive to the tundra ecosystem as wildfires are, Tape and his colleagues have concluded.
Worse than wildfires I bet, Because fires go out eventually and beavers just keep spreading north. Brace your self. It gets worse.
We’re surrounded by beaver lodges,” said Ralph Ramoth of Selawik, an Inupiat village about 90 miles east of Kotzebue.
Beaver structures have blocked access to traditional areas for duck hunting and berry-picking, and they’ve created barriers on creeks where fish used to spawn, Ramoth said. They have affected water quality as well, he said.
“When I was young, you used to be able to drink the water out of the river. Nowadays you don’t,” he said. Those who try, he said, get stomach distress. “People call it ‘beaver fever,’” he said, referring to the unpleasant intestinal infection caused by the parasite giardia.
ARGHHHHHHHHHH!!! The beaver fever myth made even more credible by the fact that it is retold by a Native American! The misunderstanding that beaver live in the dams! That dams block fish!
Good Lord.
There is evidence that such pulses are already underway. Work led by UAF researcher Jason Clark detected hotspots of methane emissions from Northwest Alaska beaver ponds. Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas and is known to be produced from permafrost thaw. The discovery of “is an example of a new disturbance regime, wrought by an ecosystem engineer, accelerating the effects of climate change in the Arctic,” said the 2023 study, which was coauthored by Tape, Jones and others at UAF, along with scientists from the National Park Service and the California Institute of Technology.
There are related effects. Though studies are preliminary, there is evidence that beavers are contributing to higher mercury levels in the water systems — and thus in fish populations. Permafrost thaw releases natural elemental mercury that is stored in frozen peat, and beavers stimulate that thaw. Additionally, the beavers may be inadvertently helping to convert that elemental mercury into methylmercury, the form that is most dangerous to people and animals.
Got that? Beavers are releasing METHANE and METHYL MERCURY into the air and water. They will make us sick and make our fish sick and speed up global warming.
Never mind that psychotic cabal all those years ago who put the shit into the air in the first place. Its the beavers fault!!!
Evidence, mostly from outside of Alaska, shows that beaver lodges and dams can create habitat for other species, from insects to birds to predators. Research into that is continuing through the A-BON program; one project, explained by UAF graduate student Sebastian Zavoico, is using sound recorders to track bird diversity at recently established Alaska beaver sites.
Never mind that false research or that very INTERSTING bird study about beaver pond. Beavers are BAD BAD BAD. They cause climate change and giardia.
