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

josefresco

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

richiebful1

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-...

tomcam

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.

pstuart

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.

declan_roberts

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.

krm01

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

_whiteCaps_

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.

analog8374

we clearly need to design better salmon.

reilly3000

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

xp84

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

steve_adams_86

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