Chapter 1: What is the significance of beavers in the new Pixar movie 'Hoppers'?
Hey, it's Flora, and you are listening to Science Friday. Beavers are having a moment.
Hey, what's your name, beaver?
Uh, Babel?
You want to live here? You better learn pond rules.
What are pond rules?
Oh, I am clear in the rest of the day.
The new Pixar movie Hoppers is about a girl who, thanks to some far-out technology, is turned into a beaver. Goofiness ensues, of course, but it's really a movie about humans coexisting with wildlife, particularly oversized rodents capable of reworking landscapes in profound ways. So we wanted to ask, what's the status of our IRL relationship with beavers? It's complicated.
And we might want to give it some thought because, according to my next guest, beavers could help humanity out if we let them. Emily Fairfax has spent her career studying these animals, and she's also the beaver science consultant on the movie Hoppers. She's based at the University of Minnesota. Emily, welcome back. Thank you. I'm super happy to be here. You've called beavers a geologic force.
What do you mean by that?
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Chapter 2: How do beavers act as a geologic force in nature?
Which doesn't always sound like the best solution, but we bury a lot of our pollution too, so it's an acceptable solution for most people.
I mean, it's what we do with most of our trash, right?
Yep.
It's basically that by slowing down the water, those pollutants then can settle and then we're not, you know, they're not making it into an aquifer. Is that the idea?
Yeah, there's a couple ways that beavers can actually remove the pollution from the water. The first is just by settling it. So when you have heavy metals like lead and arsenic and cadmium or phosphates, which is an agricultural pollutant and a nutrient, those can latch on to these really fine sediments, sink to the bottom, and just get buried over time. They leave the water column.
They're not going to continue to be in the water that we want to drink and recreate in. You can also have it be truly removed. So when nitrogen, for example, comes in as nitrates and other agricultural pollutant, that'll settle to the bottom.
But then there's all sorts of really interesting little microorganisms that live in the bottom of beaver ponds that can process it and turn it back into inert nitrogen gas, send it to the atmosphere in a way that is not going to harm people or plants or cause an algal bloom. So they genuinely removed it in that situation.
I feel like we're in a pro-beaver bubble here at Science Friday. So please burst it if needed, because I know it's not that simple, right? What is the state of the human-beaver relationship today, where you work and where you've worked in the past?
We're getting better at living with beavers and acknowledging that beavers are really helpful for us, but we still struggle with them a lot. And I've noticed more and more that you'll find people who are excited about beavers in theory, but then a beaver moves into their property or place they work and they're like, hold on, not here though. I don't want it to chew on my trees.
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Chapter 3: Why should we consider beavers as partners in land management?
I do that all the time. That's old news. But other things were a little bit different. I was taking teams of artists out into the field and showing them beaver ponds firsthand. I was watching early versions of the film when they were still hand-drawn sketches and providing feedback on it. Is this scientifically accurate? Yes or no? And if no, does it matter?
Give me an example of a sketch that you had to, like, give feedback on.
Like, the teeth were too big? What did you have to worry about?
The size of the beavers was actually one thing. We have a tendency to imagine beavers as quite small, like bunnies or muskrats. But a beaver is 40 to 110 pounds as an adult. Wow. So making sure that they are properly sized without looking monstrous on the screen was one of the things we talked about. Keeping the teeth orange was important.
Making sure that they were appropriately round and awkward and cumbersome because that's what beavers are. We don't need to make them something they're not.
Okay, so like you said, you made this distinction, like, is it factually accurate and does it matter? When does it matter for a movie like Hoppers?
It matters a lot if something is accurate, if what you're saying has potential to change how people behave towards beavers in not a good way. So, what I really didn't want them to show was beavers eating fish. Beavers do not eat fish. The media has already done us dirty on this with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and that beaver family serves up a big old plate of fish.
And that has persisted in people's minds. A lot of people reference watching that movie as the reason they think that beavers eat fish. And then we manage beavers to protect the fish, which doesn't make sense because they don't eat the fish. So we wanted to avoid the kind of myths. Oh, beavers eat plants. They eat the bark off of trees.
They eat pond weeds, lilies, cattails, grasses, sedges, fruits. They love a good sweet potato in a rehab situation, but they certainly don't eat meat. They're vegetarians. Entirely.
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Chapter 4: How do beavers contribute to wildfire resilience?
They were so great about listening to all of my rants and facts about beavers. We did beaver trivia at their holiday party. They really liked just the basic beaver biology, just the idea that beavers are enormous and that beavers... will eat their own poop once.
That was one that they just really thought was funny and tried to find a way to work it into the movie, but it didn't fit, understandably. They thought that the way beavers interacted with each other was extremely cute. The way that beavers sit on their tails like a little chair. That was a fun fact. They're like, no, they don't. That's ridiculous. It's like, no, they do.
And that made it into the movie. The beavers sit on their tails, but Mabel, the fake beaver, she puts her tail out behind her when she sits down as a tell that she is not a real beaver. She doesn't know their behaviors. Emily, what brought you to Beavers in the first place? I first got interested in Beavers seriously by watching a documentary about Beavers.
I was on a totally different career path and struggling to find out what I was going to do. I wasn't happy in the direction I was going and just happened to turn on the TV and see a PBS documentary called Leave It to Beavers. And I was so hooked. I couldn't stop thinking about it. And I trusted my gut and said, yeah, I'm going to go to grad school and study beavers.
I will find a job later that could potentially work with this path. But right now, I just need to understand this animal. So maybe this Pixar movie will be someone else's launch point like that documentary was for me.
Someone else's leave it to beavers. Were you not in science? I just, this is an aside, but what were you doing? How big of a pivot was it?
I was a weapons engineer, so it was a pretty big pivot. Yeah. Yep. I was working on weapons and had top secret clearance to work on bombs and was applying my science that way. And, you know, I had student loans to pay and that's one thing that that path is really good for. Yeah. But very quickly into it, I realized I just couldn't.
I needed to do something that felt more aligned with my goals and my values. And I had always loved wetlands. I just didn't know there were jobs in wetlands. And that documentary let me see, you know what? These people study wetlands. Maybe I can too.
Wow. What an amazing story. And I wonder if your sort of like weapons military framework or background has allowed you to understand beavers in a different way.
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