I think on average beaver ponds promote more biodiversity than human farms, allowing for a larger number of specialized species to find homes.
They’ve been slower and less industrial in their integration with the biome. They’re also region-specific. You don’t see beavers outside of North America and Scandinavia/Eastern Europe. Release a bunch of beavers into the Amazon River and I suspect you’ll either get a bunch of dead beavers or an invasive colony of beavers that fuck up the local ecology.
Some methods of farming promote biodiversity, but monoculture largely prevails - 80% of arable land plots are used for monoculture globally.
Give beavers the cognition necessary to perform deliberate inter-generational selective breeding and cultivation techniques to create large crops of sterile monocultures (bananas, for instance) that become a beaver diet staple and I suspect you’ll get a different outcome.
So we need to do better and strive to do as good of a job as the beavers do.
Beavers don’t know what they’re doing. A lot of the dam building is predicated on instinct and impulse. A big problem with humans is that we do know and we can communicate between each other to optimize our work product. Beavers do not - for instance - know about concrete. If you were able to teach them about concrete, and they were able to propagate this information inter-generationally, I doubt we would consider their projects so benign.
i suspect beavers in the amazon will likely be invasive, as they dont have natural predators other than probably anacondas? maybe jaguars, or other wildcats, but they mostly are in water. and they can bring diseases, and parasites to the amazon. one thing rodents are good is at, is breeding large numbers, but beavers might be different. the Nutria looks like a beaver with a tail has become invasive in N america.
Somewhat famously, beavers are rampant in … southern Argentina I think, and they are incredibly invasive in a biome that is not able to take advantage of them.
They’ve been slower and less industrial in their integration with the biome. They’re also region-specific. You don’t see beavers outside of North America and Scandinavia/Eastern Europe. Release a bunch of beavers into the Amazon River and I suspect you’ll either get a bunch of dead beavers or an invasive colony of beavers that fuck up the local ecology.
Give beavers the cognition necessary to perform deliberate inter-generational selective breeding and cultivation techniques to create large crops of sterile monocultures (bananas, for instance) that become a beaver diet staple and I suspect you’ll get a different outcome.
Beavers don’t know what they’re doing. A lot of the dam building is predicated on instinct and impulse. A big problem with humans is that we do know and we can communicate between each other to optimize our work product. Beavers do not - for instance - know about concrete. If you were able to teach them about concrete, and they were able to propagate this information inter-generationally, I doubt we would consider their projects so benign.
i suspect beavers in the amazon will likely be invasive, as they dont have natural predators other than probably anacondas? maybe jaguars, or other wildcats, but they mostly are in water. and they can bring diseases, and parasites to the amazon. one thing rodents are good is at, is breeding large numbers, but beavers might be different. the Nutria looks like a beaver with a tail has become invasive in N america.
Somewhat famously, beavers are rampant in … southern Argentina I think, and they are incredibly invasive in a biome that is not able to take advantage of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beavers_in_Southern_Patagonia