7 ms·

Artificial beaver dams saw juvenile coho salmon survival rates go from 8% to 60%

377 points by speckx 1mo ago

josefresco 1mo ago
Maybe I missed it, why didn't they just reintroduce beavers?
- cornstalks 1mo ago
  TFA implies the issue is land owners won’t allow it: > But beavers can only thrive if landowners allow them to.
  - repeekad 1mo ago
    Which they never will on their own, so surely conservation regulations need to be enforced, too bad the US is moving backwards right now in that regard
    - stouset 1mo ago
      Then you get people (understandably) upset that just about any work they want to do to improve their own private land needs to involve the EPA and/or a local wildlife commission.
      - mulmen 1mo ago
        Ignoring externalities remains popular. We live in a society. I can’t build a helipad on my roof in the middle of Seattle. Technically that’s a limitation on my personal liberty. We accept it because of the cost to the people around me.
        deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
        rylando 1mo ago
        Unfortunately it seems like considering the cost to those around you is becoming a dying art
      - messe 1mo ago
        Good? They don't own the commons.
      - nkrisc 1mo ago
        The alternative is we drive ourselves ever closer to the brink. It is entirely possible that our current way of living, including the idea of “private land” as it exists today, may not be conducive to our long-term survival. The forces of nature care not for our political and philosophical debates.
      - fodkodrasz 1mo ago
        The modern phrasing of "improve" and "develop" for destroy is pretty upsetting to me. My environment was improved to an unliveable asphalt/gravel sprawl from edge of city with woods with frog and birdsong...
        cucumber3732842 1mo ago
        Everything you do to waste land area by "lightly" touching it further increases sprawl because it increases the land required to do things. Environmentalism is in direct conflict with densely packing "stuff" onto land whether that's people or industry. If you want to preserve nature embrace the "concrete jungle" and the density it brings. Look at historical small towns vs modern build outs of the same population. Despite building maybe four stories high at most 50k people in some New England or Midwest mill town fit on a tiny fraction of the developed area of the same modern population simply because environmentalists weren't around to mandate engineered drainage ditches and green spaces and setbacks and require every podunk business have fire lanes a drunk could back a lowboy into and all planters in their parking lot and the other stuff
        oatmeal1 1mo ago
        High density development leaving as much pristine nature as possible is vastly superior to sprawl for the environment, but the comment you replied to didn't seem to describe a density issue.
        cucumber3732842 1mo ago
        Regardless we'd do a lot more pinprick development and develop fewer acres and there'd be less pressure to do greenfield development if not for the rules adopted at the behest of half baked 20th century environmentalism.
        thunderfork 1mo ago
        environmentalists well-known for instituting fire lane policies
      - AngryData 1mo ago
        If you don't want to deal with swampy land full of beavers, don't buy swampy land full of beavers. They should of done a better job purchasing land.
        stouset 1mo ago
        This is the opposite of a useful perspective. Someone, definitionally, owns all the privately held land in the US. Large landowners in rural areas are on average more politically connected and wield more political power in their communities. Telling them that any sort of work on their own land—no matter how small—requires extensive oversight might be well-intentioned but pisses off a lot of people who will then become bitter opponents of even well-designed environmental legislation. Telling them they should have made better purchasing decisions just motivates them even further. What actually ends up happening is these people then do it anyway with zero oversight, because the amount of land involved is too vast to enforce these things on. You also get large concerted efforts to overturn any and all environmental protection.
        AngryData 1mo ago
        You act like it is impossible to use land that beavers live on without destroying the beaver dams or removing the beavers, and yet there are plenty of people that do that very thing their entire lives without a problem. I didn't say they can't do anything with their land, but if you live on land with beavers you should know how beavers and beaver dams work so you don't do something stupid, like building a structure in the flood path of a stream or river full of beavers, or killing the beavers so that you can and then complaining about the beavers coming back. Complaining about how beavers work and what beavers are doing on your land is the same as building on a historic floodplain and then complaining about it flooding. Or building in hurricane territory and complaining about hurricanes. Or building in the woods and complaining about deer eating your plants and trees falling on your driveway. One person's lack of foresight is not and should not be everybody and everything else's problem. Do your research before you buy things. Only an asshole buys and/or builds next to an area with long established feature X and then complains about feature X existing and how its "unfair" they can't have it taken down or destroyed at will.
  - cmrdporcupine 1mo ago
    Beavers can be incredibly difficult to live alongside of. My parents have 100+ acres of bush in central Alberta. When they bought the property it was logged out and mostly in a bad abused state and mostly dry. Over a few years, beavers moved in and transformed a formerly semi-marshy spot into a full pond. And then another. And another. Eventually though, without a lot of predators around (there's some skittish bears, coyotes, that's it) they begin to overpopulate. And any efforts to keep the water level at a certain point starts to get tricky. In order to keep access to some parts of the property my dad ended up having to put in some sneaky culverts with various tricks to stop them from plugging them. (I forget, but he eventually figured out a beaverproof trick). Even then, every few years the need to "remove" some of the beavers, because they just get to be too many, they run out of poplars near their lodge and start to cause more problems for downstream and upstream neighbours. They've done amazing things for the property. But when my parents pass it's going to be hard to maintain this property with the beavers actively trying to transform it constantly.
    - cogogo 1mo ago
      Busy beaver problem?
    - xandrius 1mo ago
      Throw in some wolves and create a brand new set of problems :)
      - throwway120385 1mo ago
        That's the beauty of it. When wintertime rolls around they simply freeze to death.
        dguest 1mo ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY
    - arthurbrown 1mo ago
      What are the problems actually? That they have improved water retention and soil hydration?
  - cucumber3732842 1mo ago
    Because the government makes the water that comes with them a huge liability. Tons of vacant land owners would be happy to allow beavers and everything else if not for the fact that it destroys any prospect of doing anything on the land.
    - devilbunny 1mo ago
      His freeform, not-too-serious libertarianism can easily be mocked, but PJ O’Rourke did have a very good point about well-intentioned but counterproductive environmental legislation like the laws governing wetlands: imagine that, should an Old Master painting be discovered on your property, you were required immediately to cease all other use of the property and protect that Old Master painting against damage or theft, under penalty of law, but without any compensation for the expenses this might incur. You can imagine that any new ones found would simply be burned immediately, not protected. And wetlands laws work a bit like that.
      - cucumber3732842 1mo ago
        Regardless of specific political ideology it only takes a room temperature IQ to realize that copy pasting the concept of Royal Forests from Norman England to today is probably gonna cause all the same perverse incentives and hardship and stunt wealth accumulation/progress in the affected areas and so on. What did we spend the last few decades of the 20th century doing? Basically that. The other real fucked up thing is that most of it is state/local implementations of federal rules but that's insane because California has a completely different relationship with swamps and water than the Carolinas. The worst of it will probably get unwound when the courts adopt a "no you idiots, a fractional taking is still a taking pay the F up" doctrine but that might be a century from now. There's sooooo much money tied up in it though.
    - destitude 1mo ago
      That's a an oversimplification since beavers don't obviously adhere to property boundaries and the areas that are good for beavers are more then likely to have originally been flooded to begin with before the beavers were killed off.
  - evan_ 1mo ago
    this is basically the inciting incident of the recent movie Hoppers
  - destitude 1mo ago
    I actively allow beavers to exist. They have two dams on my property.. Previous owners a long time ago actively exterminated them. The county also actively exterminates them instead of simply putting in simple flood/beaver control devices where necessary.
    - dguest 1mo ago
      As a pre-teen I had my first encounter with the law when they figured out that I was triggering the town traps to save the beavers. My parents had to haul me down to the station so the police chief could lecture me on vandalizing town property. We had a beautiful set of beaver ponds, but the town won. Now it's just underbrush with a stream running through it. I'll never forget though: don't let your laws get in the way of doing the right thing.
- petcat 1mo ago
  The beavers are still there, just not in high numbers like they used to be. Right now the ecosystem can only support the population that is already there. Maybe eventually it will support more and then the number will increase naturally.
  - lbriner 1mo ago
    It is not so much the eco-system, it is the need for a full food-chain of animals to keep populations in-check. We like deer but without wolves or large cats, the deer become a pest but we don't like wolves and large cats because we are all taught as children that they are scary and dangerous - although more children die from car accidents and stabbings than wild animals so whatever! So natural predators for small rodents keep their numbers in check but that will be a long time because "won't somebody think of the children"..."and the farmers"
    - bcjdjsndon 1mo ago
      > it is the need for a full food-chain of animals to keep populations in-check The error you make is that there is only one, global ecosystem, and it sorts itself out. We won't be matching the power of the dinosaur comet anytime soon, and even that gave rise to mammals and eventually space travel so just chill... We dont need to do a thing
      - lukas099 1mo ago
        > We won't be matching the power of the dinosaur comet anytime soon, and even that gave rise to mammals Great, biodiversity will be restored in 100 million years, just in time for my great-great-great-great......grandchildren to enjoy.
        bcjdjsndon 1mo ago
        Lol you wouldn't be here without it though. > biodiversity will be restored Restored? What are the appropriate levels of "diversity"? Some facts humans cannot handle: - lifeforms suffer unimaginable agony every single day. - life is finite - humans are not beyond the natural order, human made global warming is natural, it won't end the planet or even us. - humans think because suffering makes them sad, suffering must be the bad. (Apart from when we don't like the other person or they've transgressed us in some way, were ethically clear to mete out violence)
- pvaldes 1mo ago
  > Maybe I missed it, why didn't they just reintroduce beavers? My guess is that trees are not there in numbers enough to support beavers. Or maybe they don't want beavers chopping the trees.
  - bcjdjsndon 1mo ago
    The latter. You are basically English, and look at us... Not a single wild predator larger than a rat. No bears, wolves, wild dogs, wild cats, not even snakes or spiders or hornets cos we killed them all. I'm just not sure it's possible cos America is so vast and has land borders
- jillesvangurp 1mo ago
  They are doing that in a few places in the UK. It's working really well and they can rapidly transform the landscapes they are in. The flip side of course is that a lot of residential areas and farmland is in what used to be wetlands that are now drained on purpose. If you introduce beavers there, it tends to be a bit disruptive as they would cause issues with flooding areas that people would prefer to keep dry. But done right, they help restore wetlands that absorb and retain water rather than causing lots of issues with flooding downstream when it rains. Wetlands have a lot of bio diversity, insects, birds, plants, predators, and all the rest. They also capture a lot of carbon All good stuff. Mostly the beavers take care of all of the heavy lifting of building dams and maintaining them. It's a lot cheaper than trying to emulate what they do with a lot of human labor. But of course keeping beavers confined to where you want them is maybe a bit hard. So, artificial dams are a good alternative.
  - imp0cat 1mo ago
    Give it a few more dry years and Europeans will learn to love their beavers, again.
  - seobotaicom 1mo ago
    Wouldn’t reintroducing beavers be cheaper in the long run if the main problem is maintaining the artificial dams?
- pvaldes 1mo ago
  We need a professional approach there, able to see the whole picture. Amateurism can be really expensive. Sometimes beavers are a big mistake. Hazelnuts and willows can be chopped to the ground and just will return stronger and more dense. Poplars will regrow from the roots at some distance. Argentinian trees they will vanish instead. This happens because temperate South American forests never evolved with beavers. On this places they may done more harm than good.
  - lukas099 1mo ago
    I would've thought it was obvious we shouldn't introduce beavers to South America if they aren't native there.
    - pvaldes 1mo ago
      So obvious, but Argentinian government didn't see it coming. Thousands millions of dollars in damages caused by amateurs with power in Argentinian government. Another example: Beavers are native from Sweden, but beavers on Sweden should be removed.
richiebful1 1mo ago
It was an interesting, but counterintuitive result that water temperatures went down after artificial beaver damming. Their theory is that the water is able to permeate more into the ground and exchange heat with the ambient underground temperature [1] 1. https://www.science.org/content/article/beaver-dams-without-beavers-artificial-logjams-are-popular-controversial-restoration https://www.science.org/content/article/beaver-dams-without-...
- Cthulhu_ 1mo ago
  Armchair theory: larger water surface from beaver lakes means larger evaporative surface means things cool down. Depends on the ambient temperature and amount of sunlight as well, of course.
- elmolino89 1mo ago
  Imho wetlands and beaver dams increase median water flow in the creeks. Without them you get a spikes of flash floods in extreme cases and a dry/just trickling stream for the dry periods. The other benefit of a higher water table and less violent water flow is the riparian vegetation shading the water.
tomcam 1mo ago
I am sick of underachieving beavers. Go us! Seriously, that would require statutory change here in Washington state. I live in a rural area with salmon waterways all over. Farmers just quietly clear the way for them, because it's illegal to make any changes to the waterway even if it's trash thrown out of cars.
- tolugenius 1mo ago
  > I am sick of underachieving beavers. Go us! This really made laugh for some reason, just imagining a beaver typing away at HN specifically.
  - rmunn 1mo ago
    And probably playing Timberborn on a second monitor at the same time.
pstuart 1mo ago
With freshwater increasingly being a problem, being able to slow down tributaries and allow the water to percolate and help rebuild aquifers is something that should be happening everywhere possible. Lost cost, high reward. Not sexy enough to get the attention it deserves.
- Cthulhu_ 1mo ago
  Loads of projects being done for that (at least in Europe) after droughts have become more and more common. Netherlands especially, worldwide experts in water management because for hundreds of years they tried to actually get rid of the water; the whole country is full of infrastructure for managing the water table. This year was bad in terms of drought, yet it seems it wasn't as bad as the one we had a few years ago (2018 or 19? I don't remember exactly) because they allowed the water table to go higher a bit, used the ijsselmeer as a giant fresh water reservoir, closed / limited locks, etc. After this year and the rapidly accellerating / worsening effects of climate change, like the drying out (ok, low water levels) of the Rhine, I'm sure they're working hard to do more. They can for example choose to allow the flood plains to flood even when there's no flooding, to (locally) add to the ground water. Granted, it takes (iirc) decades or hundreds of years for that to end up in the aquifers but better now than never. Other projects I've heard of involve allowing rivers and streams to meander again, undoing the work of straightening them to get rid of water faster and / or optimize shipping traffic.
- destitude 1mo ago
  You will be amazed at how much local governments don't care about this. They actively try to remove water was fast as possible from an area.
  - pstuart 1mo ago
    Sadly, not amazed. Flooding is a natural concern (but not natural enough to not build in a freaking flood plain), and most communities are not forward-looking enough to look upstream for solutions likely because it may be out of their township and "not my worry". Los Angeles seems to be waking up to the issue: https://www.ladwp.com/who-we-are/water-system/sources-supply/stormwater-capture https://www.ladwp.com/who-we-are/water-system/sources-supply...
declan_roberts 1mo ago
The temperature is cooler? That can't possibly be the only reason to explain such a dramatic change in survival rates. We definitely need more research on this topic.
- margalabargala 1mo ago
  If you do even a moment of reading about salmon, you will find that they are extremely sensitive to warm temperatures. Even a couple degrees F above their "normal" will allow disease to run rampant.
  - declan_roberts 1mo ago
    I give the salmon a little more credit because the entire river can't be a beaver dam. That's their theory and I think will more research we're going to learn more about what's happening here.
- oatmeal1 1mo ago
  There's more food, less energy wasted fighting excessively strong current, and more places to hide from predators. Water quality goes up downstream of a beaver(-ish) dam.
krm01 1mo ago
Whatever they eat, did that go down to an all time low. Im m curious about the chain reaction vs an isolated result.
- rmunn 1mo ago
  That was my thought too. Nothing in an ecosystem exists in isolation. Change a single variable, especially a dramatic change like going from 8% to 60% on a single variable, and there will be ripple effects throughout the local ecosystem. The Law of Unintended Consequences is one of those unchangeable, eternal laws that when you forget them, the Gods of the Copybook Headings limp up to explain it once more*. * https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm for anyone who doesn't recognize the reference in that last sentence. Most people will, I hope, but there's always the lucky 10,000. (https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/)
- destitude 1mo ago
  Cattail tubers and bark from smallish hardwood trees that they embed underwater for winter food. Hidden affect of that is the cattail is not particularly good habitat or food source for waterfowl so then you have one more item pushing down on waterfowl populations.
_whiteCaps_ 1mo ago
There's a really good book about a homesteader that did something similar to this in the 1930's in British Columbia, "Three Against The Wilderness". Basically he restored the dams that had been dynamited by the ranchers, and that restored all of the wetlands in the area. Later on, the government brought him some beavers from elsewhere, and they flourished.
- Waterluvian 1mo ago
  I love this. Especially the part where you can ask the Government of Canada for beavers. But it feels like there’s a bit of surprise to the idea that the environment takes on the form it takes on. And if you take away a part of it, it’ll take on a different form. And if you put that part back, it can take on the earlier form. There is no correct or canonical form.
  - usedtobegood 1mo ago
    There are lots of people looking to relocate beavers as their dams flood out roads etc. I can get you about 6 a year
    - StanislavPetrov 1mo ago
      You want a toe? I can get you a toe.
      - fyver 1mo ago
        With nail polish?
        zeristor 1mo ago
        By three o’clock?
    - Waterluvian 1mo ago
      Send them all my way. I could start a company. A company down by The Bay.
analog8374 1mo ago
we clearly need to design better salmon.
- lotrjohn 1mo ago
  Been there. Done that. Even attended the “spawn till you die” festival in ‘98 but all I got was a stupid t-shirt.
reilly3000 1mo ago
I’m rather partial to beavers myself and was sad to learn about their demise in North America. At one point their pelts were referred to as “the coin of the realm” https://youtu.be/8XToPq9lsOM?si=DJKedkQXuzJhSmf7 https://youtu.be/8XToPq9lsOM?si=DJKedkQXuzJhSmf7
- culi 1mo ago
  Here's your link without the surveillance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XToPq9lsOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XToPq9lsOM I'd recommend Leila Philip's Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America. It's a great work of narrative science writing. I think we deeply underestimate the profound impact beavers had on the landscape in North America. We truly live in a post-beaver geography. The beaver hat fad in Europe was the primary driver of their population going from hundreds of millions to less than 100,000. https://www.leilaphilip.com/beaverland https://www.leilaphilip.com/beaverland
  - eureka7 1mo ago
    off-topic: I've made a habit of removing all those `si` or `igshid` or `unique_share_id` (thanks airbnb for making it obvious, I guess) and I wish I'd have a "middleware" that removes them when I copy something, but I'm too lazy and it would not be cross-platform. some apps have gotten sneaky though and made every shared URL an apparently unique one :/
    - culi 1mo ago
      Yeah the best policy is to avoid using a "Share" button as much as possible and always just copy the URL bar. I have a browser extension that strips them automatically too but I don't think it always works. I wish my extension, instead of just stripping it, would mangle it randomly just to add some data poisoning to websites that do this
    - NamTaf 1mo ago
      It's not the same, as it only works on the receiving end, but I use the ClearURLs addon for stripping that out. At least it somewhat helps, and ensures that any URL I copy from my browser doesn't have tracking IDs. https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon
xp84 1mo ago
I really want this to mean dams constructed by robot beavers. Move over, A.I.! Time for A.B.
- Cthulhu_ 1mo ago
  I just... don't like comments like these; it's so much cheaper, easier and better to either have humans build one (out of biodegradeable materials like in the article) or reintroduce beavers. But instead of allocating some money for that, people allocate millions/billions to build robots that can't do the job as well.
steve_adams_86 1mo ago
I wrote a while back about some coho fry populations I found which would have benefitted tremendously from dams. Each day I returned I would find more and more empty pools along the river, picked clean of fish where I’d previously seen dozens or hundreds of fry. Beavers used to live here in great numbers, but these days it’s fairly uncommon to see them. I bet they saved a lot of coho back in their day. https://steve-adams.me/coho.html https://steve-adams.me/coho.html
- bell-cot 1mo ago
  Thank you for posting this. And also for your simple, matter-of-fact tone.
- BrtByte 1mo ago
  [dead]
PetitPrince 1mo ago
My youtube feed gets a decent amount of recommendation from channels such as Mossy Earth, Plant Wild, etc. that showcase some nature restauration project. While I cannot help myself to be a bit skeptical of those efforts (how really sustainable is all of this; isn't that just a tiny drop in the ocean, etc.), I really like to have positive and hopeful news like the one of this article amidst all the ambient negativity and pessimism.
- Cthulhu_ 1mo ago
  The way I see it, yeah it's a drop in the ocean, but these individual sites will act as "seeds", safe havens for wildlife that, from there, can spread out far and wide. Like these fish, they don't stay there, they go far and wide and become part of a much bigger ecosystem. Part of the reason why these restoration projects are important is because at the time, people weren't aware (or didn't care) of the scale or impact their efforts in hunting beavers had. I'm sure the individual hunters also figured their hunting was a drop in the ocean.
  - simpaticoder 1mo ago
    This is a good way to look at it. The more and more complex life survives the anthropocene, the better off the biosphere when this Age has passed. Many times in the past life survived in small pockets (an evolutionary bottleneck event), so making small pockets is more than just a symbolic gesture.
- BrtByte 1mo ago
  At the very least they give us real-world experiments for what works, and honestly I will take the occasional bit of ecological good news over another article explaining how doomed everything is
  - goda90 1mo ago
    And new techniques for future efforts. I forget which groups are doing what but they're doing things like pulling over trees in old plantations to increase diversity, and designing(and iterating on) coral-reef-promoting structures that can be locally manufactured and installed where restoration is needed.
listingbott 1mo ago
How long do you think these artificial dams will last?
zeristor 1mo ago
Nice. But beaver dams also capture sediment, one of the problems is that rain on loose soil forms deepening gullies. Another big part is the wetlands, which helps water refill aquifers if the soil is permeable. And a charged aquifer provides springs. I have no idea why I am so obsessed by aquifer recharge. There’s a fair number of greening the desert YouTube channels using Beaver Dam analogues funded by the state.
- goda90 1mo ago
  >I have no idea why I am so obsessed by aquifer recharge. Maybe humans have an instinct for water management like beavers do. >There’s a fair number of greening the desert YouTube channels using Beaver Dam analogues funded by the state. I enjoy some of these too. There's also water management focused regenerative agriculture projects that are cool like food garden pond systems in Hawaii[0] [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24uCCr3KjCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24uCCr3KjCI
  - marcosdumay 1mo ago
    > Maybe humans have an instinct for water management like beavers do. We absolutely do. For both water and fire management.
BrtByte 1mo ago
[flagged]
freetime2 1mo ago
Practical Engineering recently did an episode comparing human dams to beaver dams. Not really an apples to apples comparison because we build dams for very different purposes, but beaver dams are not only less disruptive to the environment - they are often a net positive. Although they do sometimes create a nuisance for human infrastructure. https://practical.engineering/blog/2026/8/18/are-beavers-actually-good-at-dams https://practical.engineering/blog/2026/8/18/are-beavers-act...
pfdietz 1mo ago
There's a wetland near where I live where beavers have reached saturation, with a web of dams that has turned a valley into prime beaver habitat. (1:45 short video) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/k_OZqbrMJGY https://www.youtube.com/shorts/k_OZqbrMJGY
evereverever 1mo ago
I really thought this 'Artificial Beavers' thing would be different. For reals though, the straightening of rivers has led to less habitat, less lost curves that host the most important animals.

377 points by speckx 1mo ago

josefresco 1mo ago

Maybe I missed it, why didn't they just reintroduce beavers?

cornstalks 1mo ago
TFA implies the issue is land owners won’t allow it: > But beavers can only thrive if landowners allow them to.
- repeekad 1mo ago
  Which they never will on their own, so surely conservation regulations need to be enforced, too bad the US is moving backwards right now in that regard
  - stouset 1mo ago
    Then you get people (understandably) upset that just about any work they want to do to improve their own private land needs to involve the EPA and/or a local wildlife commission.
    - mulmen 1mo ago
      Ignoring externalities remains popular. We live in a society. I can’t build a helipad on my roof in the middle of Seattle. Technically that’s a limitation on my personal liberty. We accept it because of the cost to the people around me.
      - deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
      - rylando 1mo ago
        Unfortunately it seems like considering the cost to those around you is becoming a dying art
    - messe 1mo ago
      Good? They don't own the commons.
    - nkrisc 1mo ago
      The alternative is we drive ourselves ever closer to the brink. It is entirely possible that our current way of living, including the idea of “private land” as it exists today, may not be conducive to our long-term survival. The forces of nature care not for our political and philosophical debates.
    - fodkodrasz 1mo ago
      The modern phrasing of "improve" and "develop" for destroy is pretty upsetting to me. My environment was improved to an unliveable asphalt/gravel sprawl from edge of city with woods with frog and birdsong...
      - cucumber3732842 1mo ago
        Everything you do to waste land area by "lightly" touching it further increases sprawl because it increases the land required to do things. Environmentalism is in direct conflict with densely packing "stuff" onto land whether that's people or industry. If you want to preserve nature embrace the "concrete jungle" and the density it brings. Look at historical small towns vs modern build outs of the same population. Despite building maybe four stories high at most 50k people in some New England or Midwest mill town fit on a tiny fraction of the developed area of the same modern population simply because environmentalists weren't around to mandate engineered drainage ditches and green spaces and setbacks and require every podunk business have fire lanes a drunk could back a lowboy into and all planters in their parking lot and the other stuff
        oatmeal1 1mo ago
        High density development leaving as much pristine nature as possible is vastly superior to sprawl for the environment, but the comment you replied to didn't seem to describe a density issue.
        cucumber3732842 1mo ago
        Regardless we'd do a lot more pinprick development and develop fewer acres and there'd be less pressure to do greenfield development if not for the rules adopted at the behest of half baked 20th century environmentalism.
        thunderfork 1mo ago
        environmentalists well-known for instituting fire lane policies
    - AngryData 1mo ago
      If you don't want to deal with swampy land full of beavers, don't buy swampy land full of beavers. They should of done a better job purchasing land.
      - stouset 1mo ago
        This is the opposite of a useful perspective. Someone, definitionally, owns all the privately held land in the US. Large landowners in rural areas are on average more politically connected and wield more political power in their communities. Telling them that any sort of work on their own land—no matter how small—requires extensive oversight might be well-intentioned but pisses off a lot of people who will then become bitter opponents of even well-designed environmental legislation. Telling them they should have made better purchasing decisions just motivates them even further. What actually ends up happening is these people then do it anyway with zero oversight, because the amount of land involved is too vast to enforce these things on. You also get large concerted efforts to overturn any and all environmental protection.
        AngryData 1mo ago
        You act like it is impossible to use land that beavers live on without destroying the beaver dams or removing the beavers, and yet there are plenty of people that do that very thing their entire lives without a problem. I didn't say they can't do anything with their land, but if you live on land with beavers you should know how beavers and beaver dams work so you don't do something stupid, like building a structure in the flood path of a stream or river full of beavers, or killing the beavers so that you can and then complaining about the beavers coming back. Complaining about how beavers work and what beavers are doing on your land is the same as building on a historic floodplain and then complaining about it flooding. Or building in hurricane territory and complaining about hurricanes. Or building in the woods and complaining about deer eating your plants and trees falling on your driveway. One person's lack of foresight is not and should not be everybody and everything else's problem. Do your research before you buy things. Only an asshole buys and/or builds next to an area with long established feature X and then complains about feature X existing and how its "unfair" they can't have it taken down or destroyed at will.
- cmrdporcupine 1mo ago
  Beavers can be incredibly difficult to live alongside of. My parents have 100+ acres of bush in central Alberta. When they bought the property it was logged out and mostly in a bad abused state and mostly dry. Over a few years, beavers moved in and transformed a formerly semi-marshy spot into a full pond. And then another. And another. Eventually though, without a lot of predators around (there's some skittish bears, coyotes, that's it) they begin to overpopulate. And any efforts to keep the water level at a certain point starts to get tricky. In order to keep access to some parts of the property my dad ended up having to put in some sneaky culverts with various tricks to stop them from plugging them. (I forget, but he eventually figured out a beaverproof trick). Even then, every few years the need to "remove" some of the beavers, because they just get to be too many, they run out of poplars near their lodge and start to cause more problems for downstream and upstream neighbours. They've done amazing things for the property. But when my parents pass it's going to be hard to maintain this property with the beavers actively trying to transform it constantly.
  - cogogo 1mo ago
    Busy beaver problem?
  - xandrius 1mo ago
    Throw in some wolves and create a brand new set of problems :)
    - throwway120385 1mo ago
      That's the beauty of it. When wintertime rolls around they simply freeze to death.
      - dguest 1mo ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY
  - arthurbrown 1mo ago
    What are the problems actually? That they have improved water retention and soil hydration?
- cucumber3732842 1mo ago
  Because the government makes the water that comes with them a huge liability. Tons of vacant land owners would be happy to allow beavers and everything else if not for the fact that it destroys any prospect of doing anything on the land.
  - devilbunny 1mo ago
    His freeform, not-too-serious libertarianism can easily be mocked, but PJ O’Rourke did have a very good point about well-intentioned but counterproductive environmental legislation like the laws governing wetlands: imagine that, should an Old Master painting be discovered on your property, you were required immediately to cease all other use of the property and protect that Old Master painting against damage or theft, under penalty of law, but without any compensation for the expenses this might incur. You can imagine that any new ones found would simply be burned immediately, not protected. And wetlands laws work a bit like that.
    - cucumber3732842 1mo ago
      Regardless of specific political ideology it only takes a room temperature IQ to realize that copy pasting the concept of Royal Forests from Norman England to today is probably gonna cause all the same perverse incentives and hardship and stunt wealth accumulation/progress in the affected areas and so on. What did we spend the last few decades of the 20th century doing? Basically that. The other real fucked up thing is that most of it is state/local implementations of federal rules but that's insane because California has a completely different relationship with swamps and water than the Carolinas. The worst of it will probably get unwound when the courts adopt a "no you idiots, a fractional taking is still a taking pay the F up" doctrine but that might be a century from now. There's sooooo much money tied up in it though.
  - destitude 1mo ago
    That's a an oversimplification since beavers don't obviously adhere to property boundaries and the areas that are good for beavers are more then likely to have originally been flooded to begin with before the beavers were killed off.
- evan_ 1mo ago
  this is basically the inciting incident of the recent movie Hoppers
- destitude 1mo ago
  I actively allow beavers to exist. They have two dams on my property.. Previous owners a long time ago actively exterminated them. The county also actively exterminates them instead of simply putting in simple flood/beaver control devices where necessary.
  - dguest 1mo ago
    As a pre-teen I had my first encounter with the law when they figured out that I was triggering the town traps to save the beavers. My parents had to haul me down to the station so the police chief could lecture me on vandalizing town property. We had a beautiful set of beaver ponds, but the town won. Now it's just underbrush with a stream running through it. I'll never forget though: don't let your laws get in the way of doing the right thing.
petcat 1mo ago
The beavers are still there, just not in high numbers like they used to be. Right now the ecosystem can only support the population that is already there. Maybe eventually it will support more and then the number will increase naturally.
- lbriner 1mo ago
  It is not so much the eco-system, it is the need for a full food-chain of animals to keep populations in-check. We like deer but without wolves or large cats, the deer become a pest but we don't like wolves and large cats because we are all taught as children that they are scary and dangerous - although more children die from car accidents and stabbings than wild animals so whatever! So natural predators for small rodents keep their numbers in check but that will be a long time because "won't somebody think of the children"..."and the farmers"
  - bcjdjsndon 1mo ago
    > it is the need for a full food-chain of animals to keep populations in-check The error you make is that there is only one, global ecosystem, and it sorts itself out. We won't be matching the power of the dinosaur comet anytime soon, and even that gave rise to mammals and eventually space travel so just chill... We dont need to do a thing
    - lukas099 1mo ago
      > We won't be matching the power of the dinosaur comet anytime soon, and even that gave rise to mammals Great, biodiversity will be restored in 100 million years, just in time for my great-great-great-great......grandchildren to enjoy.
      - bcjdjsndon 1mo ago
        Lol you wouldn't be here without it though. > biodiversity will be restored Restored? What are the appropriate levels of "diversity"? Some facts humans cannot handle: - lifeforms suffer unimaginable agony every single day. - life is finite - humans are not beyond the natural order, human made global warming is natural, it won't end the planet or even us. - humans think because suffering makes them sad, suffering must be the bad. (Apart from when we don't like the other person or they've transgressed us in some way, were ethically clear to mete out violence)
pvaldes 1mo ago
> Maybe I missed it, why didn't they just reintroduce beavers? My guess is that trees are not there in numbers enough to support beavers. Or maybe they don't want beavers chopping the trees.
- bcjdjsndon 1mo ago
  The latter. You are basically English, and look at us... Not a single wild predator larger than a rat. No bears, wolves, wild dogs, wild cats, not even snakes or spiders or hornets cos we killed them all. I'm just not sure it's possible cos America is so vast and has land borders
jillesvangurp 1mo ago
They are doing that in a few places in the UK. It's working really well and they can rapidly transform the landscapes they are in. The flip side of course is that a lot of residential areas and farmland is in what used to be wetlands that are now drained on purpose. If you introduce beavers there, it tends to be a bit disruptive as they would cause issues with flooding areas that people would prefer to keep dry. But done right, they help restore wetlands that absorb and retain water rather than causing lots of issues with flooding downstream when it rains. Wetlands have a lot of bio diversity, insects, birds, plants, predators, and all the rest. They also capture a lot of carbon All good stuff. Mostly the beavers take care of all of the heavy lifting of building dams and maintaining them. It's a lot cheaper than trying to emulate what they do with a lot of human labor. But of course keeping beavers confined to where you want them is maybe a bit hard. So, artificial dams are a good alternative.
- imp0cat 1mo ago
  Give it a few more dry years and Europeans will learn to love their beavers, again.
- seobotaicom 1mo ago
  Wouldn’t reintroducing beavers be cheaper in the long run if the main problem is maintaining the artificial dams?
pvaldes 1mo ago
We need a professional approach there, able to see the whole picture. Amateurism can be really expensive. Sometimes beavers are a big mistake. Hazelnuts and willows can be chopped to the ground and just will return stronger and more dense. Poplars will regrow from the roots at some distance. Argentinian trees they will vanish instead. This happens because temperate South American forests never evolved with beavers. On this places they may done more harm than good.
- lukas099 1mo ago
  I would've thought it was obvious we shouldn't introduce beavers to South America if they aren't native there.
  - pvaldes 1mo ago
    So obvious, but Argentinian government didn't see it coming. Thousands millions of dollars in damages caused by amateurs with power in Argentinian government. Another example: Beavers are native from Sweden, but beavers on Sweden should be removed.

richiebful1 1mo ago

It was an interesting, but counterintuitive result that water temperatures went down after artificial beaver damming. Their theory is that the water is able to permeate more into the ground and exchange heat with the ambient underground temperature [1] 1. https://www.science.org/content/article/beaver-dams-without-beavers-artificial-logjams-are-popular-controversial-restoration https://www.science.org/content/article/beaver-dams-without-...

Cthulhu_ 1mo ago
Armchair theory: larger water surface from beaver lakes means larger evaporative surface means things cool down. Depends on the ambient temperature and amount of sunlight as well, of course.
elmolino89 1mo ago
Imho wetlands and beaver dams increase median water flow in the creeks. Without them you get a spikes of flash floods in extreme cases and a dry/just trickling stream for the dry periods. The other benefit of a higher water table and less violent water flow is the riparian vegetation shading the water.

tomcam 1mo ago

I am sick of underachieving beavers. Go us! Seriously, that would require statutory change here in Washington state. I live in a rural area with salmon waterways all over. Farmers just quietly clear the way for them, because it's illegal to make any changes to the waterway even if it's trash thrown out of cars.

tolugenius 1mo ago
> I am sick of underachieving beavers. Go us! This really made laugh for some reason, just imagining a beaver typing away at HN specifically.
- rmunn 1mo ago
  And probably playing Timberborn on a second monitor at the same time.

pstuart 1mo ago

With freshwater increasingly being a problem, being able to slow down tributaries and allow the water to percolate and help rebuild aquifers is something that should be happening everywhere possible. Lost cost, high reward. Not sexy enough to get the attention it deserves.

Cthulhu_ 1mo ago
Loads of projects being done for that (at least in Europe) after droughts have become more and more common. Netherlands especially, worldwide experts in water management because for hundreds of years they tried to actually get rid of the water; the whole country is full of infrastructure for managing the water table. This year was bad in terms of drought, yet it seems it wasn't as bad as the one we had a few years ago (2018 or 19? I don't remember exactly) because they allowed the water table to go higher a bit, used the ijsselmeer as a giant fresh water reservoir, closed / limited locks, etc. After this year and the rapidly accellerating / worsening effects of climate change, like the drying out (ok, low water levels) of the Rhine, I'm sure they're working hard to do more. They can for example choose to allow the flood plains to flood even when there's no flooding, to (locally) add to the ground water. Granted, it takes (iirc) decades or hundreds of years for that to end up in the aquifers but better now than never. Other projects I've heard of involve allowing rivers and streams to meander again, undoing the work of straightening them to get rid of water faster and / or optimize shipping traffic.
destitude 1mo ago
You will be amazed at how much local governments don't care about this. They actively try to remove water was fast as possible from an area.
- pstuart 1mo ago
  Sadly, not amazed. Flooding is a natural concern (but not natural enough to not build in a freaking flood plain), and most communities are not forward-looking enough to look upstream for solutions likely because it may be out of their township and "not my worry". Los Angeles seems to be waking up to the issue: https://www.ladwp.com/who-we-are/water-system/sources-supply/stormwater-capture https://www.ladwp.com/who-we-are/water-system/sources-supply...

declan_roberts 1mo ago

The temperature is cooler? That can't possibly be the only reason to explain such a dramatic change in survival rates. We definitely need more research on this topic.

margalabargala 1mo ago
If you do even a moment of reading about salmon, you will find that they are extremely sensitive to warm temperatures. Even a couple degrees F above their "normal" will allow disease to run rampant.
- declan_roberts 1mo ago
  I give the salmon a little more credit because the entire river can't be a beaver dam. That's their theory and I think will more research we're going to learn more about what's happening here.
oatmeal1 1mo ago
There's more food, less energy wasted fighting excessively strong current, and more places to hide from predators. Water quality goes up downstream of a beaver(-ish) dam.

krm01 1mo ago

Whatever they eat, did that go down to an all time low. Im m curious about the chain reaction vs an isolated result.

rmunn 1mo ago
That was my thought too. Nothing in an ecosystem exists in isolation. Change a single variable, especially a dramatic change like going from 8% to 60% on a single variable, and there will be ripple effects throughout the local ecosystem. The Law of Unintended Consequences is one of those unchangeable, eternal laws that when you forget them, the Gods of the Copybook Headings limp up to explain it once more*. * https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm for anyone who doesn't recognize the reference in that last sentence. Most people will, I hope, but there's always the lucky 10,000. (https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/)
destitude 1mo ago
Cattail tubers and bark from smallish hardwood trees that they embed underwater for winter food. Hidden affect of that is the cattail is not particularly good habitat or food source for waterfowl so then you have one more item pushing down on waterfowl populations.

_whiteCaps_ 1mo ago

There's a really good book about a homesteader that did something similar to this in the 1930's in British Columbia, "Three Against The Wilderness". Basically he restored the dams that had been dynamited by the ranchers, and that restored all of the wetlands in the area. Later on, the government brought him some beavers from elsewhere, and they flourished.

Waterluvian 1mo ago
I love this. Especially the part where you can ask the Government of Canada for beavers. But it feels like there’s a bit of surprise to the idea that the environment takes on the form it takes on. And if you take away a part of it, it’ll take on a different form. And if you put that part back, it can take on the earlier form. There is no correct or canonical form.
- usedtobegood 1mo ago
  There are lots of people looking to relocate beavers as their dams flood out roads etc. I can get you about 6 a year
  - StanislavPetrov 1mo ago
    You want a toe? I can get you a toe.
    - fyver 1mo ago
      With nail polish?
      - zeristor 1mo ago
        By three o’clock?
  - Waterluvian 1mo ago
    Send them all my way. I could start a company. A company down by The Bay.

analog8374 1mo ago

we clearly need to design better salmon.

lotrjohn 1mo ago
Been there. Done that. Even attended the “spawn till you die” festival in ‘98 but all I got was a stupid t-shirt.

reilly3000 1mo ago

I’m rather partial to beavers myself and was sad to learn about their demise in North America. At one point their pelts were referred to as “the coin of the realm” https://youtu.be/8XToPq9lsOM?si=DJKedkQXuzJhSmf7 https://youtu.be/8XToPq9lsOM?si=DJKedkQXuzJhSmf7

culi 1mo ago
Here's your link without the surveillance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XToPq9lsOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XToPq9lsOM I'd recommend Leila Philip's Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America. It's a great work of narrative science writing. I think we deeply underestimate the profound impact beavers had on the landscape in North America. We truly live in a post-beaver geography. The beaver hat fad in Europe was the primary driver of their population going from hundreds of millions to less than 100,000. https://www.leilaphilip.com/beaverland https://www.leilaphilip.com/beaverland
- eureka7 1mo ago
  off-topic: I've made a habit of removing all those `si` or `igshid` or `unique_share_id` (thanks airbnb for making it obvious, I guess) and I wish I'd have a "middleware" that removes them when I copy something, but I'm too lazy and it would not be cross-platform. some apps have gotten sneaky though and made every shared URL an apparently unique one :/
  - culi 1mo ago
    Yeah the best policy is to avoid using a "Share" button as much as possible and always just copy the URL bar. I have a browser extension that strips them automatically too but I don't think it always works. I wish my extension, instead of just stripping it, would mangle it randomly just to add some data poisoning to websites that do this
  - NamTaf 1mo ago
    It's not the same, as it only works on the receiving end, but I use the ClearURLs addon for stripping that out. At least it somewhat helps, and ensures that any URL I copy from my browser doesn't have tracking IDs. https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon

xp84 1mo ago

I really want this to mean dams constructed by robot beavers. Move over, A.I.! Time for A.B.

Cthulhu_ 1mo ago
I just... don't like comments like these; it's so much cheaper, easier and better to either have humans build one (out of biodegradeable materials like in the article) or reintroduce beavers. But instead of allocating some money for that, people allocate millions/billions to build robots that can't do the job as well.

steve_adams_86 1mo ago

I wrote a while back about some coho fry populations I found which would have benefitted tremendously from dams. Each day I returned I would find more and more empty pools along the river, picked clean of fish where I’d previously seen dozens or hundreds of fry. Beavers used to live here in great numbers, but these days it’s fairly uncommon to see them. I bet they saved a lot of coho back in their day. https://steve-adams.me/coho.html https://steve-adams.me/coho.html

bell-cot 1mo ago
Thank you for posting this. And also for your simple, matter-of-fact tone.
BrtByte 1mo ago
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PetitPrince 1mo ago

My youtube feed gets a decent amount of recommendation from channels such as Mossy Earth, Plant Wild, etc. that showcase some nature restauration project. While I cannot help myself to be a bit skeptical of those efforts (how really sustainable is all of this; isn't that just a tiny drop in the ocean, etc.), I really like to have positive and hopeful news like the one of this article amidst all the ambient negativity and pessimism.

Cthulhu_ 1mo ago
The way I see it, yeah it's a drop in the ocean, but these individual sites will act as "seeds", safe havens for wildlife that, from there, can spread out far and wide. Like these fish, they don't stay there, they go far and wide and become part of a much bigger ecosystem. Part of the reason why these restoration projects are important is because at the time, people weren't aware (or didn't care) of the scale or impact their efforts in hunting beavers had. I'm sure the individual hunters also figured their hunting was a drop in the ocean.
- simpaticoder 1mo ago
  This is a good way to look at it. The more and more complex life survives the anthropocene, the better off the biosphere when this Age has passed. Many times in the past life survived in small pockets (an evolutionary bottleneck event), so making small pockets is more than just a symbolic gesture.
BrtByte 1mo ago
At the very least they give us real-world experiments for what works, and honestly I will take the occasional bit of ecological good news over another article explaining how doomed everything is
- goda90 1mo ago
  And new techniques for future efforts. I forget which groups are doing what but they're doing things like pulling over trees in old plantations to increase diversity, and designing(and iterating on) coral-reef-promoting structures that can be locally manufactured and installed where restoration is needed.

listingbott 1mo ago

How long do you think these artificial dams will last?

zeristor 1mo ago

Nice. But beaver dams also capture sediment, one of the problems is that rain on loose soil forms deepening gullies. Another big part is the wetlands, which helps water refill aquifers if the soil is permeable. And a charged aquifer provides springs. I have no idea why I am so obsessed by aquifer recharge. There’s a fair number of greening the desert YouTube channels using Beaver Dam analogues funded by the state.

goda90 1mo ago
>I have no idea why I am so obsessed by aquifer recharge. Maybe humans have an instinct for water management like beavers do. >There’s a fair number of greening the desert YouTube channels using Beaver Dam analogues funded by the state. I enjoy some of these too. There's also water management focused regenerative agriculture projects that are cool like food garden pond systems in Hawaii[0] [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24uCCr3KjCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24uCCr3KjCI
- marcosdumay 1mo ago
  > Maybe humans have an instinct for water management like beavers do. We absolutely do. For both water and fire management.

BrtByte 1mo ago

[flagged]

freetime2 1mo ago

Practical Engineering recently did an episode comparing human dams to beaver dams. Not really an apples to apples comparison because we build dams for very different purposes, but beaver dams are not only less disruptive to the environment - they are often a net positive. Although they do sometimes create a nuisance for human infrastructure. https://practical.engineering/blog/2026/8/18/are-beavers-actually-good-at-dams https://practical.engineering/blog/2026/8/18/are-beavers-act...

pfdietz 1mo ago

There's a wetland near where I live where beavers have reached saturation, with a web of dams that has turned a valley into prime beaver habitat. (1:45 short video) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/k_OZqbrMJGY https://www.youtube.com/shorts/k_OZqbrMJGY

evereverever 1mo ago

I really thought this 'Artificial Beavers' thing would be different. For reals though, the straightening of rivers has led to less habitat, less lost curves that host the most important animals.