I read the
article “Leave It to Beavers” by David Ferry published in The Atlantic in June 2012. This
article talks about the effects on the ecosystem without beavers. And that they
are helpful to us deal with some of the effects of global warming. Here is the
link to the article http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/leave-it-to-beavers/308980/
Believe it
or not but beavers were once very close to extinction. To give you some brief
background information, in the 1820’s people were trying to kill every beaver
in the Pacific Northwest, with in 20 years of this almost all the beavers from
this area were gone. Nobody knew how great beavers were for the ecosystem.
Today there are only around 6-12 million beavers, where as in the 1600’s there
were around 400 million.
Our earth is impacted more than you would
think by animals like the beaver. The damns that beavers make do many great
things for the environment such as, they control flooding and forest fries, and
they allow for fish populations to grow, they also conserve fresh water. We are
very fortunate that there are organizations that are trying to grow the beaver
population because they are very useful animals for global warming.
To help you
understand how the beaver helps in todays global warming issues here is a line
from the article, “Because of rising temperatures, the snowpack is melting
earlier in springtime, causing trillions of gallons of fresh water to gush down
from the mountains, overwhelming streams and sluicing over the ground too fast
to nourish the ecosystem.” The point of this line is that with beaver to build
damns this could e avoided.
Overall I
think it is a good idea to try to bring back more beavers but it makes me think
about what we learned about food webs and chain. It could result in a
disruption of the community; if there are more beavers then there will be less
of the food beavers eat which could lead to more issues. Hopefully the
organizations who are trying to bring back the beavers have thought over all
the issues that could arise from changing the dynamic of a community/ecosystem.
I agree that bringing back beavers is a good thing. I never thought of beavers as a limited species that was important to the environment. Beaver furs and fat were very popular for trade in the 1800's and thus hunted, and also some people viewed beavers as pests and tried to hunt them to extinction. We're lucky they didn't! I never realized how big of an impact beavers have on an ecosystem, preserving water and sustaining fish populations. If beavers were not here the food chain wood be very different (get it? wood?) I'll make sure to look out for beavers the next time I'm near a pond. I hope that the beaver rescue groups succeed without going over board and disrupting the food chain.
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