Beavers could be humans' biggest ally, if we let them
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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?
Beavers are a geologic force because the scale they operate at, both in space and time, is enormous. Beavers are all over the North American continent. One beaver family is changing and shaping two kilometers of a stream. Huge territories. And they've been doing it for seven and a half million years. They've been modifying things for way longer than people have been building dams or canals or any of our other feats of engineering.
That does seem amazing. I mean, are they good land managers? Like, do you think we should turn over public land to beavers?
They're great land managers. I think we should work with them on public land. We have our own interests to look out for. We are not beavers. But we could definitely collaborate with them a little bit more seriously. I think a lot of times we don't want to work with beavers because they're pretty chaotic and we tend to like rules and order and plans.
What do you mean they're chaotic?
Well, have you ever seen a beaver pull a permit or draw a blueprint? No. They do not give you any insight as to how they're going to build, and they change in the moment to respond to their surroundings. They'll start their dam, the water will flow a little bit different, and they'll change their plan, and they'll change it again. And they are just constantly making the landscape incredibly messy, and it's that messiness that makes it resilient.
Well, yeah, why should we work with them?
We should work with beavers because we are facing what is probably the biggest challenge of our generation. Climate change is an enormous, difficult thing for us to deal with. And it might be too much to deal with on our own. So we need to work with nature. And we are so lucky that there is another engineer out there that has millions of years of experience doing exactly that, creating stable habitats, surviving climate change, making habitat for other species. We can put our human brains on stuff we're really good at and then partner with beavers for the things that they're good at, like creating biodiversity and stopping fires.
Yeah, I wanted to drill down on that, the wildfire resilience. And we covered this on the show a couple of years ago in Colorado, where beaver territory did much better in a big wildfire out there. Do you see them as sort of key to wildfire mitigation?
Beavers are definitely key to wildfire mitigation. When you think about what North America used to look like when we had all the beavers of the past, it was 10 times as many as we have now. Every single stream was this bright green belt of vegetation. It was wet. It was difficult to burn. It would have been so much harder to have huge destructive fires back then. So bringing back beavers is about making landscapes that are resilient to fire, not just patches, but entire ecosystems, entire states. They're outstanding at this.
I mean, besides keeping things wet, do beaver dams have any other remediation effects?
Yeah. So after a fire, one of the big concerns is you'll have a lot of ash and debris and all sorts of things flow into the water and contaminate it.
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