In this video, we are learning about beaver facts. Beavers are able to modify their environment by cutting down trees and building dams. The wetland ecosystem is dependent on beavers, making them a keystone species! Did you know Beavers have orange teeth, smell like vanilla, and do not actually eat wood?
Below is the video I made about beaver facts, if you prefer reading it, keep scrolling.
10 Cool Facts about Beavers
Did you know entire ecosystems depend upon beaver dams for their survival?
10. Beavers have Orange Teeth
Beaver teeth enamel is reinforced with iron. This extra strength is what allows them to chomp down trees.
Even when their orange teeth wear down, it is not a problem. Because like all rodents, beavers have ever-growing incisors.
9. Nature’s Little Lumberjacks
Beaver’s are nocturnal and mostly work the 12 hour night shift.
They prefer to cut down smaller trees that aren’t too heavy to transport, but sometimes they will cut down full-grown trees with the plan of collecting the upper branches.
Beavers chew around the trunk in a circle, and after the tree cracks to the ground, the entire family comes to help cut it up. They then drag this smaller section to the water and ferry them towards the construction site.
Beavers are actually incredibly strong. These burly lumberjacks weigh about 60 pounds (27.2 kg) and can carry their weight in wood.
8. Dam Engineers
Before a dam is built, a single male beaver will scout streams for a deep section of slowly moving water. About 2-3 feet (60-90 m) deep is a good spot. Here, he will build a new home. Hopefully, it’s luxurious enough to impress his future wife.
After picking a location, logs and large sticks are rammed into the mud below. The beaver then reinforces this infrastructure with rocks to prevent it from drifting downstream. Next, foliage, twigs, leaves, and mud are used to fill in the gaps.
Beavers know that rivers have the power to wash away everything in their path, so they will build the dam only so high that it can safely withstand the pressure behind it.
When completed, the dam creates a reservoir behind it. The goal is to further raise the water level around his future home construction site. I guess female beavers like deep water.
A typical dam is 10-300 ft (3-91 m) in length. But, According to the prestigious Guinness World Records, the longest dam today is 2,788 ft (849.7 m) long. It is more than 50 years old and was discovered by satellite imaging in the remote wilderness of Canada.
Beaver’s are very obsessive about fixing leaks. They can sense changes in the water current, but probably mostly detect leaks by sound.
When researchers placed speakers playing a running water sound near a beaver dam, they came back the next day to find the speakers buried in sticks and mud.
7. Home Architects
This is one of my favorite beaver facts. Beaver lodges can be 10 feet tall and 25 feet across (3×7.6m). This classic picturesque lodge is situated in the middle of the reservoir, surrounded by deep water.
But sometimes rivers are too damn strong to build a dam, and beavers have no choice but to build a lodge attached to the river bank instead. This is way less flashy. All Lodges have multiple underwater entrances, which deter any predator who isn’t scuba certified.
Wolves, foxes, birds of prey, bears, or bobcats would all have to dig through the entire mud-encrusted and sometimes frozen mound to get inside.
When designing a new lodge, beavers can dig whatever tunnel system and chambers they like. This huge pile of debris takes about 2 weeks to build and helps keep body heat in during the wintertime.
Beavers sometimes even allow muskrats to share the lodge. Extra watchful eyes can be helpful.
RELATED POST (OR VIDEO): Facts about African Grey Parrots
6. Close-knit Families
Beaver families share one house, which is socially structured much like a traditional human family unit is. But life moves faster and you get kicked out of the house when you hit puberty not after turning 18.
The family starts with a male and female, who general bond for life. Every spring, they have 1-4 babies, called “kits.” In their first year, Kits learn engineering skills from their parents and help maintain the dam.
When they reach one year old, they become babysitters for the next litter. The babysitters bring food to the newborns, who can start eating after turning just 1 week old as they ween off of milk.
Usually, By year 3, kits reach sexual maturity and leave home to build a new beaver family. Mom and dad typically live with 6-12 of their offspring at any given time during their 10-15 year natural lifespan.
5. Peaceful Vegetarians
Beavers are not termites. They are herbivores, and they can’t actually digest logs! They eat mostly tree bark, leaves, roots, and most interestingly aquatic plants.
Building a dam increases the wetland area for pondweed, cattails, and lilypads to grow. Beavers can easily be called passive farmers.
Before wintertime, beavers stock up on green twigs and buds. They store this fresh food in the deep water, where it becomes refrigerated under the ice.
Beavers do not hibernate, and after it starts snowing, they only leave the lodge to quickly swim under the ice to eat from this food reserve.
Ice can further waterproof leaks in the dam, and it is critical for water levels to remain deep enough that beavers can swim under the ice. A freeze through to the bottom of the pond could starve the beavers.
When food is scarce, beavers will even eat their own feces to have a second chance at absorbing all of the nutrients.
Why do all of the coolest animals have to eat poop?!
4. A keystone species
Like humans, beavers are an animal that modifies the environment. Dam building is vital for the other species in their wetland ecosystem. A keystone species holds an entire ecosystem together, and if it disappears, the system as a whole will collapse.
For example, coral is a keystone for all other species on the great barrier reef. If coral goes extinct, so does 25% of all marine life reliant upon it.
Beavers have a similar impact.
Beaver dams transform quickly flowing streams into a tranquil pond environment. Also, the mass deforestation caused by beavers has a benefit. It allows sunlight to shine into the wetland.
This open wetland environment can support a rich diversity of life. The less turbulent, sunny pond allows photosynthetic algae to grow. It is then eaten by insects. Up the food chain, we have fish and frogs, which can be eaten by otters, snakes or birds.
At the top, apex predators like eagles, bears, and wolves can now survive in this new environment all made possible by the beaver.
3. A battle against Extinction
Prior to colonization, in the 1600s, North America was home to about 400 million beavers Shockingly by 1900, only 100,000 were left. That is a 99.9% decrease in population over just 300 years.
Like a ravenous plague, human settlers swept west across the modern-day United States and Canada.
Colonists found beavers to be an incredibly valuable resource. We hunted them for their fur, meat, and special castor sacs. Castor sacs contain a biological oil that was very expensive for 2 reasons:
- [1] Castoreum oil smells great like sweet vanilla and it can be used as a perfume or as a “natural” food flavoring.
- Back in the day vanilla syrup contained beaver butt juice, but today we use mostly synthetic flavoring.
- [2] Castoreum oil was sold as medicine, a calming sleep medicine that was sometimes transformed into aspirin.
- Once the beaver was recognized as a keystone species, a series of conservation efforts, hunting bans, and reintroduction projects allowed its numbers to recover. Today, beavers are not endangered and there are more than 10 million worldwide.
2. Powerful Swimmers
Beavers have several adaptions that make them outstanding at swimming in nature’s ice baths.
- [1] That castoreum oil they make is used to naturally waterproof their coats.
- [2] Webbed feet. The large surface area helps to quickly propel themselves underwater.
- [3] A flattened tail. Beavers use this tail as a paddle and as a rudder. It also can make a loud slapping sound against the surface of the water. This alerts family members that a predator is nearby.
- [4] A variable heart rate. Beavers can lower their metabolism and hold their breath for 15 minutes. People can do this too, but only elite free-divers and David Blaine.
- [5] Swim goggles. Beavers have a 3rd transparent eyelid under the main two. It is called a nictitating membrane. This see-through skin allows beavers to see underwater with the same comfort as their eyes being closed.
1. An Unknown Future
A human-sized relative of the beaver, the giant beaver, went extinct about 10,000 years ago during the last ice age. A mix of climate change and hunting was to blame.
Today, there are two surviving species of beavers. The North American Beaver (Castor Canadensis) is quite similar to the Eurasian Beaver (Castor Fiber), but they can not interbreed.
Both thrive in northern temperate zones with wetland forests. Eurasian beavers are slightly larger, have a lighter fur color, build dams less frequently, and have bigger snouts!
I like big noses, so I guess the Eurasian one is better.
Eurasian beavers are also more clumsy on land and have a bigger oil sac. The Eurasian beaver came much closer to extinction than the north American beaver did. It was exterminated from the UK in the 1,500s and only an estimated 1,200 remained worldwide at one point.
Today both American and Eurasian beaver populations are healthy, but beavers are at risk because they are in a conflict with humans over water management.
Farmers and landowners see the beaver as a pest because they can cause local flooding, and even re-direct water away from their crops. Things get messy when animals mess with people’s income.
But I think, overall, beavers are helpful because they build and maintain 1000s of small dams for free. This greatly reduces catastrophic flood risk and purifies water.
I am interested to see how the conflict between beavers and humans evolves as water becomes a more and more precious resource.
If you enjoyed this video of beaver facts, it would mean a lot to me if you will subscribe to my Youtube Channel where I have multiple series such as Animals Facts, Animal Education, and Animal News.
SAVE THIS ARTICLE ON YOUR PINTEREST BY PINNING THE IMAGE BELOW
