Anyone interested, there’s a colony sim game named Timberborn where you play as beavers. Unsurprisingly, this comic gets posted there every few weeks. :P
Great game, highly recommend
there’s something about the water physics that makes it really fun… like just imagining and building dams never gets old
Fun game, just came out of early access too.
On the one had great game on the other hand when I start playing it I forget to sleep
That’s two endorsements in one post!
I’d heard of that one and somehow ended up with whiskerwood instead, which is mice ruled by cats. Its still pretty early early access, but very cute :)
Thanks for the reminder!
The most unrealistic thing about this is that there’s still life on a planet we leave behind.
The oceanic volcanic vent dwellers might survive.
Well, yeah, they’re camping in spawn. Weak.
Beavers actually build spaces that allow for more specialized species to thrive. We could do that too, theoretically.
We do do that. You’re describing farming. Humans love to terraform land masses in order to propagate species we consider beneficial. Check out Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States and a view of history in which humanity itself became domesticated through symbiosis with native species.
I think on average beaver ponds promote more biodiversity than human farms, allowing for a larger number of specialized species to find homes. This article gives a breif view of how beavers help to boost biodiversity, including hosting beaver pond specialists. Some methods of farming promote biodiversity, but monoculture largely prevails - 80% of arable land plots are used for monoculture globally.
So we need to do better and strive to do as good of a job as the beavers do.
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.
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.
TIL
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.
I can definitely see how a race of superintelligent industrialized beavers could be a bad thing for the world, so as far as the comic goes you are right lol.
As for real life beavers - whether beavers are conscious of it or not, the way they relate to the ecosystems they inhabit in some ways sets an example for humans to follow. We don’t need to limit ourselves to only living in North America and Scandinavia/Eastern Europe, but maybe we should try to farm in ways that intentionally promote species diversity. There could be other lessons to take as well, such as spending more effort farming appropriate locations (beavers spend considerable effort finding the right place to set up shop) - many farms around the world are located without much thought toward how they will relate to neighboring ecosystems.
As for real life beavers - whether beavers are conscious of it or not, the way they relate to the ecosystems they inhabit in some ways sets an example for humans to follow.
Be annoyed by the sound of running water. Cut down trees until the water stops. Eat any smaller animals or non-poisonous plants in the vicinity. Repeat.
This is just The Romans.
and a recent scishow about how “weedy” species like rye tricked humans into propagating it, ultimately evolving into a crops itself.
I’m not sure this is still true in the industrial era where human impact is responsible for habitat loss, monocultures, mass extinction and loss of biodiversity and reduction of undomesticated biomass in general.
We do that. Mainly for rats, pigeons and cockroaches tho.
Crows be eatin good out here
Or just stop destroying the environment so the beavers can do their thing.
We do do that? No such thing as a non-GMO cow.
pidgeons
yeah I think if your too knowledgable on the subject the cartoon kinda falls flat.
Read the Bobiverse books.
Spoiler
There’s an alien Beaver race that’s super advanced and built a ringworld.
The Late Devonian mass extinction was the result of plant-life evolving to perform photosynthesis and net-positive release of a corrosive toxic gas known as Oxygen. Rapid proliferation of plant life, which existed with virtually no natural predators and well before the advent of decomposing fungi, resulted in a massive sequestration of carbon which lowered the temperature of the planet drastically.
What humans are doing is cataclysmic for the current biome. But never forget we are on earth’s 6th mass extinction event. What humans enjoy that so many prior species lacked was scientific precognition. We know the consequences of our behaviors and can anticipate them in a way prior dominant species could not. But we are one more lifeform. We are part of the earth, not divorced from it.
We are still, at a fundamental level, a consequence of the natural forces that created us. The sudden rapid re-release of all that sequestered carbon is as natural as the process that formed it 378M years ago.
Thank you!! Finally someone not treating humans as a sort of cancer, separate of nature, and that all the nice and friendly animals (humans are definitely not animals!!11!) wait for them to disappear to live here in an untouched harmony for millennia. What we need people to understand is that we don’t protect the environment, our environment for the planet, sea turtles, or life in general, we do it as to prevent our own extinction.
also we’re not re-releasing all of the sequestered carbon. more like a thousandth of it.
all oxygen today used to be CO2. so there was at least 200 mbar (mili-bar, 10^-3 bar) of CO2 in the atmosphere. humanity has released 200 ubar (micro-bar, 10^-6 bar) of CO2 so far, and if the renewable energy buildout continues at the current exponential rate, we’re gonna release maybe 300 or 400 ubar in total before no more fossil fuels will be burned. that’s approximately 0.2% of what was sequestered.
The sudden rapid re-release of all that sequestered carbon is as natural as the process that formed it 378M years ago.
Let me highlight. You are telling industrial revolution, and the emmision of green house gases is as natural as, some other process happened in the nature? And humans continued doing it even after knowing the consequences of it, even when there were much better alternatives abundantly available?
I’m struggling to see the “natural” part of it.
Humans are part of nature.
Being part of nature doesn’t make your behavior natural.
Humans existed on this planet for thousands of years without releasing massive amounts of carbon.
Humans are part of nature as well
You are telling industrial revolution, and the emmision of green house gases is as natural as, some other process happened in the nature?
Or as unnatural, if you prefer. Humans are a product of their biome. Human intelligence is a result of the same natural selection processes that created photosynthesis and fungal decomposition. Human behaviors are a result of ecological forces and stimulus. Human economics is predicated on the raw natural materials available for development. Human science is predicated on the observation of the natural world.
I’m struggling to see the “natural” part of it.
Show me a thing a human has done that a natural force hasn’t.
Everything from naturally occurring nuclear reactors to Natural polymers (aka: plastics) already exist. And our industrial application of their techniques is the result of our study of their natural function.
We’re an invasive species. We’re an apex predator. We produce tons of non-decomposible waste products. But other species - particularly, species responsible for global extinction events - have filled this role in prior eras.
We recognize the hazards of this very natural and organic process of human proliferation and development as a problem only because we can recognize the ultimate outcomes of unchecked growth.
The only truly unnatural thing humans do is to recognize our own threat of mass extinction and actively seek to prevent it.
As far as I am aware, nothing has ever released this much sustained co2 over such a short period. Even outliers like the Deccan traps did it far more slowly.
So there’s usually, after a while, bacteria develop that can consume stuff. Plastic currently stays just because the bacteria consuming it haven’t developed yet.
But there was one exception. Early trees. Nothing could consume those. Dead trees just piled up and turned into coal. After millions of years, bacteria that can consume dead trees developed, but they still couldn’t consume the coal.
But way later, another species developed, one that digs out the coal and consumes it by burning it.
If we look at it this way, the only “unnatural” thing here is those trees that resisted consumption for so long.
There actually are multiple bacteria which can eat PET plastic now. The ocean is lousy with them because that’s where we put all the plastic. :)
Shit, they invented plastic
Memory triggered
Is it just me or does that construction look delicious?
I love that episode where the Fraggles decide not to eat the structures anymore. The result is that Doozers somehow succumb to poverty as they can’t work anymore. So instead they turn to knitting.
Later their usual song of how building and construction is the best thing in the world has been replaced by different lyrics about how knitting is the best thing in the world.
At the end when the Fraggles eat the structures again, the Doozers of course go back to building. Things go back to normal pretty quickly, and their usual building-song is back to how construction is the best thing in the world. But they’re all wearing knitted scarves.
Fraggle Rock taught me the concept of ecosystems better than any science teacher ever could
Great theme song too!
RCE, you bastard!
Animal Farm ahh moment
You know u can say ass right? This isn’t TikTok ffs
Yes… and
In case you didn’t know, “ahh” originated as an eye dialect form of “ass” representing a debuccalized pronunciation used in some dialects of AAVE, I think Southern dialects specifically — so “ahh” was not originally intended as a word replacement, any more than “ass” was intended as a word replacement of “arse”. Rather “ahh” was just a representation of how the word was pronounced by some people.
The problem is that probably most people online who use “ahh” instead of “ass” nowadays are either tu-vuo-falling Black people, or they find “ahh” inherently comical, or they’re using “ahh” to evade social media censorship bots.
I do find “ahh” inherently comical in this case.
I don’t see Boxer anywhere.
And they start poluting the same when reaching a similar level of development as humans when the industrial revolution occured
but… the beavers are altering!
