I want to write a satirical short story about a total global collapse for the silliest reason possible and would absolutely love to use a premise as ridiculous as a beaver taking down the internet.
>it appears the beavers dug underground alongside the creek to reach our cable, which is buried about three feet underground and protected by a 4.5-inch thick conduit. The beavers first chewed through the conduit before chewing through the cable in multiple locations,"
sounds very determined, and i wonder what caused that beaver's rage against the machine.
It's not exactly unexpected the last mile cable for a small village to have no redundancy. The redundancy is: use your cellular connection until they fix the cable.
Not sure why you’re downvoted - the article says “Telus warns that cellphone service in the area is likely to be spotty until the cable is repaired.” Maybe the cellular outage is from more people using it rather than damage?
It's a tiny town with only a few road routes in and out. Now go do the budget in dollars per km to build a fully redundant ring topology of fiber, via diverse routing, to the nearest mid size city. Lots of rural places are effectively a singlehomed stub, and you take your chances with a flash flood washing out a conduit alongside a road, trees falling on lines, beavers, etc.
What are the odds that [insert your favorite boogeyman global power] has already seeded every submarine communications cable with "robotic beavers", patiently awaiting an activation signal? It is frightening how fragile the physical security of global networks appears to be.
Gentle reminder that multiple countries around the world have almost accidentally started a nuclear holocaust. I'm not that bothered by Netflix going down.
For what it's worth, that's exactly why it seems like something that is likely to actually happen.
It's one thing to threaten mutual nuclear destruction and quite another to give the order to actually kill hundreds of millions of people and almost certainly end or ruin your own life. Since that basically excludes any intentional act by a moral or rational actor, my understanding is that the closest calls were usually cases of mistaken intent.
A global internet outage would be devastating for economic and possibly humanitarian reasons, but would not have the degree of practical and moral deterrence that exists for nuclear weapons.
Friendly reminder that it's a lot easier to be talked into hating an "other" when there's no ability to communicate and only the agitators on either side get heard.
> It is frightening how fragile the physical security of global networks appears to be.
Protecting miles and miles of cable running through the wilderness is an herculean task, especially since usually nobody attempts to attack it. One can of course do a three-way fallback of landline/direct radio link/satellite, but that would be insane cost for, again, basically no benefit and no bandwidth.
Two fiber lines is really the best thing you're going to get if you want good and fast internet speeds at reasonable prices.
Well, yes. Current satellite is pretty awful by all accounts. And many places (like my house 40 miles outside of Boston) don't get great cellular reception--which has effective bandwidth caps in any case. In those situations, StarLink looks like a pretty good option, such as at my dad's house where he had 1 Mbps DSL.
But probably not so great for the crowd that thinks they can't live without 1 Gbps and TBs of data/month.
Yes and no. Starlink is definitely a solution for very small village or remote cabins, but economy of scale kicks in pretty fast.
Doing napkin math, the village has 2k people, so let's assume 400 households. If each of those wants 100 Mbit/s, we'd need a 40 Gbit/s link. Maybe 10 Gbit/s with over-provisioning. So that's basically a satellite only for this village. Not to mention that satellites have their own set of vulnerabilities.
Probably easier to just lay a redundant fiber liner and use star link for emergencies, in case the robotic beavers take over :)
> especially since usually nobody attempts to attack it.
Don’t tell the folks at UMN, they’ll look at it and think, “OMG! It would be so easy to cut with an axe. Such a massive security vulnerability. Bet I could write a paper about this. Where’s my axe?”
I sort of assume there's lots of stuff like this that exists and people constantly bringing it up at every opportunity is kind of tiring. The converse where "everyone knows" but doesn't acknowledge it isn't necessarily any better though.
Anyways, the mental image of robot beaver drones with glowing red eyes causing havoc makes up for it.
> Is it? I have access pretty much all the time and can’t name an outage (that wasn’t caused by me), ever.
I think that's because the system is designed to be resilient to random failures (e.g., disgruntled beaver). Submarine cables fail all the time and there are repair boats constantly fixing breakages caused by fishing, wildlife, etc.
All of the submarine cables failing at the same time (e.g., terrorist beavers) is most definitely not a random failure and would, I suspect, cause some proper havoc and take months to fix.
With crap ADSL I had plenty of times where it got slow, and painfully so (1-2mbps). Now that it’s all fibre it’s been rock solid.
Masses of investment went into the fibre roll out here in New Zealand and the limiting thing now seems to be the connection to the wider world and the distances involved.
2gbps and 4gbps plans are available, but while attractive, I don’t use all my 1gbps plan and struggle to think of a home use that would. The home infrastructure required would also be significant.
Couldn’t they just restrict the communication on that cable at one of the buildings on either end of the cable? Seems likely that they’d still want to use the cable for some approved communications and would have no trouble controlling things without resort to a robotic cable-chewer.
This is so that country A can prevent communications between country B and country C in case of war.
I'm not sure it is an especially valuable war tactic, because while you can probably take out some cat videos for a few hours, serious military and political communications will be redirected over satellite links quite quickly.
Sure, in a total war situation I suppose cutting all long-distance communications would obviously be on the table. But it wouldn’t be up there on my list of concerns, cuz nukes and stuff.
I’d see it as a larger concern in the context of terrorism or very asymmetric warfare.
I won't disagree that the physical security of the last mile is quite fragile, but I'm not sure the same holds true for the global Internet.
There's no single topology of the Internet, but if I had to try and sum it up: it approaches a mesh at the core, and approaches a star at the edge. Backbones peer with thousands of providers; businesses may have a primary and backup ISP; home users are lucky to even have a second ISP offering service in their area.
Likely every global power has the maps and the tools to do it, but doing it would not be very useful unless it's a part of some kind of terror campaign. Military equipment that needs communications likely can operate over the air, or has some internal networking - it's not like they're usually deployed next to major network exchanges. You can cause some inconvenience, even panic, maybe even stock market crash - but any over hostile action from a major power would do that anyway just by the fact it happens.
Yes! When I lived there, there was no bridge to Kinuseo, so you had to drive through the Murray. I crossed with a friend who had a lifted Dodge 4x4. It was more than a little un-nerving to have water starting to fill the cab...
The other thing I remember is that the Conservation Service used to catch poachers up in that area with "robot" deer (IIRC, the extent of the automation was that the heads turned).
I never thought I would see this place mentioned on HN. It is a fairly quiet place way up in British Columbia. When I was there a long time ago they had a nice self-contained town with skating/hockey rink, a Mountie station, a couple of streets through the middle of town with shopping for all the essentials, and gas stations and clubs near the outside of town. We would hit up that club that had beer, billiards, and karaoke for fun when we'd get the occasional chance to go into town.
I worked on a drilling rig outside of town on the side of a mountain above timberline. It was beautiful country, absolutely fantastic. When I got there I thought about what a waste it was to be drilling in such a beautiful place with all the desolate places still available on earth and no guaranteed payout due to complex geology.
Native wildlife wandered by camp and the location daily. Back then Canada really led the way with their environmental protections. All water related to drilling had to be contained on the location within a berm large enough to prevent escape. Vacuum trucks ran all day if necessary and when it did rain it was a 24 hour a day job until the location was clear of pooled water that could escape into the clear creeks in the area. Solids control (handling drill cuttings) involved collection and compression of cuttings to remove fluids which were then chemically treated to restore their properties for reuse in drilling while the cuttings were pelletized for shipment offsite. I had never seen that in the US. They clearly had a commitment to environmental protection.
Years later the Harper government came in and eliminated some of those protections to favor production, especially of their vast oil sands resources.
When I was in college, those oil sands were given as an example of one of the largest petroleum deposits on earth. The case was made that they would never fully be developed since the oil had lost all the lighter fraction and it was necessary to inject steam to recover from most of the sands. This was an expensive process wasting and polluting huge quantities of water, but it was also something that would forever destroy a huge region and render the water undrinkable. The projection back then was that it would take sustained $80/bbl oil for it to be economical since the process was so expensive.
Fast forward a couple decades and everything has ramped up due to oil price increases driven largely by a switch from demand pricing in the markets to speculative pricing and you see the resulting devastation they have wrought on the area.
Pretty sad. I hate that my career has enabled bullshit like this. All those places I visited and came to love have been destroyed by an industry full of liars who value integrity only when it involves keeping an industry secret and encourage the opposite when the truth could cause your business model financial problems.
Tumbler Ridge has some really nice waterfalls nearby if you ever visit and it is not far from other places worth seeing. I took all the time when I should've been in camp sleeping for the next tour (shift) and drove out to Chetwynd, Dawson Creek, Fort St John and other places so I could see things that I felt I would never again have the opportunity to see. I saw the color change from summer to fall colors as it spread across the landscape, watched trees lose their leaves, felt the first unexpected snowfall as it buried our gear under 3 feet of fresh snow, I jumped off a snow cornice and slid down the side of the mountain on my chest using my feet as steering so I could dodge all the obvious rocks. I watched a grizzly walk down the same valley I had just crossed and pause to sniff the wind when he caught my trail.
I know they'll get the problem fixed. This just brought back so much.
This makes me inexplicably happy. For whatever reason, any story about wild animals wreaking havoc on our fiddly human contrivances is incredibly amusing. I'm sure there's a literary or philosophical term that captures this feeling. This applies doubly so for beavers. I can't quite put my finger on the reason for that; maybe it's because they're so busy and determined, to the extent that all their accidental floodings and property destruction feel entirely intentional and premeditated.
It makes me think of the recent "Nature is healing" memes (sometimes "Nature is healing, we are the virus"), i.e. Nature is taking back what humans assumed was theirs to keep.
It makes me think of how anti-human, self-hatred focused (all notions that humans are a virus derive from self-hatred first, without exception), and irrational those memes are, since humans are nature. Anything we do and anything we build, is nature in action.
What kind of adversary is mother nature expecting that she would spawn such monstrosities? It seems like the most serious case of paranoia. I feel like a means of mass producing bad ideas now.
Given how thoroughly humanity has polluted this planet seemingly entirely for its own selfish gain, surely from the perspective of “nature” the extinction of humanity would be no great loss.
> Anything we do and anything we build, is nature in action.
perhaps not the precise term, but "wabi-sabi" comes to mind; something like the beauty of nature, the impermanence of things, and decay; i.e., an appreciation of nature's tendency towards maximal entropy. also the phrase, "the best laid plans of mice and men."
This reminds me of my neighbour’s recent problem with his fibre (to the premises) broadband here in the UK. After losing internet connectivity, he eventually managed to get a BT Openreach engineer out only to discover the overhead cables had been chewed through presumably by a grey squirrel. Apparently they have a taste for something in the outer casing..
I hope that beaver can chew through all fiber cables in the world and people go outside and live more and communicate in person again. Good job beaver.
How can they tell where is the cable damage? If the cable is all underground, surely they didn’t dig up the whole thing? Can they measure that from one end? Do they do a binary search by digging and testing?
OTDR - optical time domain reflectometer, you connect it to the fiber at one end and it'll tell you where the break is, accurate to plus or minus 20-30 meters
If you want to understand how TDR works, watch this classic tutorial from the mid-50s in the AT&T archive. The first 5 minutes, showing the reflection of an open and short circuit is enough.
Many are surprised when they learned that it's possible to detect the location of a break in the mains wiring or an Ethernet cable, just by doing an electrical test from one end of the cable (some Ethernet cards even have builtin TDR support!). There's no closed loop, why is it possible to test anything electrically? Because at high frequency, the circuit becomes an electromagnetic waveguide.
Basically like a radar, you send a fast electrical or optical pulse to the electrical cable or the optical fiber, the EM wave travels along the cable until it hits the break and reflects back. You record the time and listen for the echo. All discontinuities (such as damages) on the line will reflect and distort the original pulse. Use the speed of light to pinpoint the location of the fault.
Beavers are extremely cool. Being Canadian, I never gave them very much thought until the youtube algorithm one day had me watching a documentary about them, that lead to me searching out another documentary to watch about them because they're so fascinating.
Beavers make habitats! They create entire ecosystems! They turn semi-arid land into lush wetlands. Their lodges become homes for muskrats and otters. The wetlands they make support bird, and frog, and fish populations.
California used to have hundreds of thousands of them. The now-semiarid Central Valley looked very different before humans started trapping them in masse, and dammed rivers in the Sierras. I wish I could go back in time and see central California circa 1700. I sometimes wonder if we could restore some of what we lost.
Yeah, beavers are one of the few animals like us who toil to adapt their habitat to themselves instead of just accepting it.
I've also heard that beavers can't stand the sound of running water, and if you put speakers playing running water in their lodge, they will go to great effort to try and find and dam it. I don't know if that's true, but it seems plausible.
I was looking for the (cbc?) story of a farmer in Alberta or Saskatchewan who was attracting beavers by this very method to reintroduce them to the environment, but I didn’t find it. Might have been CBC Ideas[0]. I’ll have to leave it as an exercise for the reader.
I know you're using "garden" in a somewhat hyperbolic sense here, but I have to say that I've never particularly liked that framing; I think it implies a degree of control/domesticity over the natural environment that doesn't quite sit well with me, compared to other terms for the same process like "re-wilding", etc.
> Beavers make habitats! They create entire ecosystems! They turn semi-arid land into lush wetlands. Their lodges become homes for muskrats and otters. The wetlands they make support bird, and frog, and fish populations.
Species that have such major effects on their ecosystem are called keystone species [1]. Beavers are one of the more visible examples.
Beavers are a very special type of keystone species, which is what the GP is getting at. Sea stars and wolves, for example, are keystone species in many habitats because they control herbivore populations but that impact pales in comparison to habitat building animals like reef-building corals or beavers.
I've always found them a bit of an annoyance! Algonquin Park is full of them and they make some of the backcountry routes difficult by changing water levels through it. The amount of beaver dams I have pulled my canoe over!
My parents have been having a kind of entertaining saga with the beavers that have colonized their rural property in Alberta. It's 100+ acres of bush neighbouring forested crown land, and it had been logged out and abused a bit before they moved there and built their house. So they've spent the last decade and a half restoring it.
In the low lying portion of their land there was always a gully with a tiny little trickle of water, a bit marshy, but no creek or pond. Enough you could step over it, that's it.
Fast forward 15 years and it's now a full pond with a beaver dam and at least one lodge and the water is now so high they can't get to the other half of their property. My dad builds bridges but the beavers keep raising the water level. He builds what he thinks are beaver-proof culverts to lower the water level a bit (but still enough for the beavers), and it works for a couple years and then eventually the beavers figure it out.
Unfortunately it has gotten to the point where he may have to do a bit of population control on them, as they are getting beyond destructive and he's getting older. He tried to live in harmony with them, but it's gotten tricky. Luckily their house is well up on the hill but they do want to be able to get to the other half of their property.
When I was in Canada I was talking to farmers who routinely trapped beavers and blew up their damns with dynamite. Otherwise they'd flood huge swaths of farmland.
On a related note, there's a book called Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter[1] that I read over the holidays that goes really into detail about the animals and their effect on the world around them. Really great read, and I'm really excited/hopeful to see them spread into more areas and do their thing, despite the occasional "mischief" they seem to get into.
This happens with cars pretty frequently too, though usually with squirrels. They get in and chew up the wiring harness under the hood. It's crazy expensive to fix because it's not always clear where all the damage is, and access often requires disassembling tons of stuff in the engine bay.
Some rabbits got my car earlier this spring in the driveway. The price to fix wasn't astronomical, but luckily their little nest was quite visible once they jacked the car up. The wires they chewed were close to that.
There was an interesting lawsuit a while ago about how newer cars use a plastic for the wire insulation that's alledgedly more attractive to rodents, although I don't recall the outcome.
The car wires are because people started using insulation out of peanut, soy, and rice husks. Good example of something that seemed superficially good for the environment but had unforeseen consequences. I'm not advocating for asbestos here, but there are certainly non-edible, noxious alternatives.
The Bugaboos in Eastern BC are well known for having rubber-eating porcupines. Standard practice when leaving a car at the trailhead for a while is to wrap the underside in chickenwire.
Had exactly this happen to my Fit. Can confirm it was an expensive fix, increasing TCO of the car by a significant percentage since it wasn’t a very expensive car to begin with. I can only hope the squirrel enjoyed their $1,000 lunch.
This just happened (again) to my car recently, and threw off all of the electronic sensors in the car. I'm considering some well-placed .22 shots to take the nuisances out, because the fixes are absurdly costly.
Reading this, my first thought really was that some Telus outside plant fiber crews (and possibly contracted trenching or directional boring contractor) are about to make a lot of overtime.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadsounds very determined, and i wonder what caused that beaver's rage against the machine.
1- https://parli.ca/worthwhile-canadian-initiative/
It's one thing to threaten mutual nuclear destruction and quite another to give the order to actually kill hundreds of millions of people and almost certainly end or ruin your own life. Since that basically excludes any intentional act by a moral or rational actor, my understanding is that the closest calls were usually cases of mistaken intent.
A global internet outage would be devastating for economic and possibly humanitarian reasons, but would not have the degree of practical and moral deterrence that exists for nuclear weapons.
Protecting miles and miles of cable running through the wilderness is an herculean task, especially since usually nobody attempts to attack it. One can of course do a three-way fallback of landline/direct radio link/satellite, but that would be insane cost for, again, basically no benefit and no bandwidth.
Two fiber lines is really the best thing you're going to get if you want good and fast internet speeds at reasonable prices.
But probably not so great for the crowd that thinks they can't live without 1 Gbps and TBs of data/month.
Doing napkin math, the village has 2k people, so let's assume 400 households. If each of those wants 100 Mbit/s, we'd need a 40 Gbit/s link. Maybe 10 Gbit/s with over-provisioning. So that's basically a satellite only for this village. Not to mention that satellites have their own set of vulnerabilities.
Probably easier to just lay a redundant fiber liner and use star link for emergencies, in case the robotic beavers take over :)
Don’t tell the folks at UMN, they’ll look at it and think, “OMG! It would be so easy to cut with an axe. Such a massive security vulnerability. Bet I could write a paper about this. Where’s my axe?”
Anyways, the mental image of robot beaver drones with glowing red eyes causing havoc makes up for it.
Is it? I have access pretty much all the time and can’t name an outage (that wasn’t caused by me), ever.
When something gets broken somewhere, presumably my data gets routed around the issue.
I think that's because the system is designed to be resilient to random failures (e.g., disgruntled beaver). Submarine cables fail all the time and there are repair boats constantly fixing breakages caused by fishing, wildlife, etc.
All of the submarine cables failing at the same time (e.g., terrorist beavers) is most definitely not a random failure and would, I suspect, cause some proper havoc and take months to fix.
Masses of investment went into the fibre roll out here in New Zealand and the limiting thing now seems to be the connection to the wider world and the distances involved.
2gbps and 4gbps plans are available, but while attractive, I don’t use all my 1gbps plan and struggle to think of a home use that would. The home infrastructure required would also be significant.
I'm not sure it is an especially valuable war tactic, because while you can probably take out some cat videos for a few hours, serious military and political communications will be redirected over satellite links quite quickly.
I’d see it as a larger concern in the context of terrorism or very asymmetric warfare.
There's no single topology of the Internet, but if I had to try and sum it up: it approaches a mesh at the core, and approaches a star at the edge. Backbones peer with thousands of providers; businesses may have a primary and backup ISP; home users are lucky to even have a second ISP offering service in their area.
> Cut submarine cables
You don’t need any of that to break havoc on the internet. Just use BGP to advertise bogus routes to any prefixes.
https://mobile.twitter.com/axios/status/1382696186684014592
The average outage from these fiber cuts is orders of magnitude longer than the most catastrophic bgp hijacks.
The easiest way to defeat a burglar alarm is with an axe through the power/communication cable.
(A better system has a battery backup and uses the cellular network, but the latter is expensive and has bandwidth problems.)
Listening to it chomping away was anxiety inducing. Pics Peanut Butter turned out to be the perfect bait.
https://www.picspeanutbutter.com
The other thing I remember is that the Conservation Service used to catch poachers up in that area with "robot" deer (IIRC, the extent of the automation was that the heads turned).
I worked on a drilling rig outside of town on the side of a mountain above timberline. It was beautiful country, absolutely fantastic. When I got there I thought about what a waste it was to be drilling in such a beautiful place with all the desolate places still available on earth and no guaranteed payout due to complex geology.
Native wildlife wandered by camp and the location daily. Back then Canada really led the way with their environmental protections. All water related to drilling had to be contained on the location within a berm large enough to prevent escape. Vacuum trucks ran all day if necessary and when it did rain it was a 24 hour a day job until the location was clear of pooled water that could escape into the clear creeks in the area. Solids control (handling drill cuttings) involved collection and compression of cuttings to remove fluids which were then chemically treated to restore their properties for reuse in drilling while the cuttings were pelletized for shipment offsite. I had never seen that in the US. They clearly had a commitment to environmental protection.
Years later the Harper government came in and eliminated some of those protections to favor production, especially of their vast oil sands resources.
When I was in college, those oil sands were given as an example of one of the largest petroleum deposits on earth. The case was made that they would never fully be developed since the oil had lost all the lighter fraction and it was necessary to inject steam to recover from most of the sands. This was an expensive process wasting and polluting huge quantities of water, but it was also something that would forever destroy a huge region and render the water undrinkable. The projection back then was that it would take sustained $80/bbl oil for it to be economical since the process was so expensive.
Fast forward a couple decades and everything has ramped up due to oil price increases driven largely by a switch from demand pricing in the markets to speculative pricing and you see the resulting devastation they have wrought on the area.
Pretty sad. I hate that my career has enabled bullshit like this. All those places I visited and came to love have been destroyed by an industry full of liars who value integrity only when it involves keeping an industry secret and encourage the opposite when the truth could cause your business model financial problems.
Tumbler Ridge has some really nice waterfalls nearby if you ever visit and it is not far from other places worth seeing. I took all the time when I should've been in camp sleeping for the next tour (shift) and drove out to Chetwynd, Dawson Creek, Fort St John and other places so I could see things that I felt I would never again have the opportunity to see. I saw the color change from summer to fall colors as it spread across the landscape, watched trees lose their leaves, felt the first unexpected snowfall as it buried our gear under 3 feet of fresh snow, I jumped off a snow cornice and slid down the side of the mountain on my chest using my feet as steering so I could dodge all the obvious rocks. I watched a grizzly walk down the same valley I had just crossed and pause to sniff the wind when he caught my trail.
I know they'll get the problem fixed. This just brought back so much.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmanuelfelton/coronavi...
I agree that the "cute/relentless" combo of beavers is quite comical..! See:
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/beavers-continue-relentless-...
> Anything we do and anything we build, is nature in action.
“It’s comin’ right for us!”
Humans are the first biosphere-changing organism that can actually think about what we do, and maybe not go off the deep end.
I think humanity's efforts to do so, as imperfect as they are, are worthy of praise.
Maybe not go off the deep end? David Attenborough would like to have a word [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Attenborough:_A_Life_on_...
even at this day and age we're still doing that cruelty of subjecting the animals to the hours/days long medieval torture.
It's not 100% that, but "schadenfreude" comes close.
It's easy to forget, but we really should not.
* AT&T Archives: Similiarities of Wave Behavior
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DovunOxlY1k
Many are surprised when they learned that it's possible to detect the location of a break in the mains wiring or an Ethernet cable, just by doing an electrical test from one end of the cable (some Ethernet cards even have builtin TDR support!). There's no closed loop, why is it possible to test anything electrically? Because at high frequency, the circuit becomes an electromagnetic waveguide.
Basically like a radar, you send a fast electrical or optical pulse to the electrical cable or the optical fiber, the EM wave travels along the cable until it hits the break and reflects back. You record the time and listen for the echo. All discontinuities (such as damages) on the line will reflect and distort the original pulse. Use the speed of light to pinpoint the location of the fault.
LOL surviving beaver's in 2021. At first I thought this was a joke, but no... beaver's are getting smarter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyBZ1mdg2c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N15sLwRCmnc
Beavers make habitats! They create entire ecosystems! They turn semi-arid land into lush wetlands. Their lodges become homes for muskrats and otters. The wetlands they make support bird, and frog, and fish populations.
California used to have hundreds of thousands of them. The now-semiarid Central Valley looked very different before humans started trapping them in masse, and dammed rivers in the Sierras. I wish I could go back in time and see central California circa 1700. I sometimes wonder if we could restore some of what we lost.
I've also heard that beavers can't stand the sound of running water, and if you put speakers playing running water in their lodge, they will go to great effort to try and find and dam it. I don't know if that's true, but it seems plausible.
> The sound of running water appears to stimulate dam-building, and the sound of a leak in a dam triggers them to repair it. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver#Infrastructure
I heard if you lock a human in a room with a rock and stick, they'll make a pointy stick. I don't know if that's true, but it seems plausible.
Sorry, I had to ;)
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas
Edit: I think it may have been this episode, but I can’t find audio for it: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/rethinking-the-beaver-why-bea...
We absolutely could; we could make this entire planet a garden if we chose. We simply lack the will.
Species that have such major effects on their ecosystem are called keystone species [1]. Beavers are one of the more visible examples.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species
In the low lying portion of their land there was always a gully with a tiny little trickle of water, a bit marshy, but no creek or pond. Enough you could step over it, that's it.
Fast forward 15 years and it's now a full pond with a beaver dam and at least one lodge and the water is now so high they can't get to the other half of their property. My dad builds bridges but the beavers keep raising the water level. He builds what he thinks are beaver-proof culverts to lower the water level a bit (but still enough for the beavers), and it works for a couple years and then eventually the beavers figure it out.
Unfortunately it has gotten to the point where he may have to do a bit of population control on them, as they are getting beyond destructive and he's getting older. He tried to live in harmony with them, but it's gotten tricky. Luckily their house is well up on the hill but they do want to be able to get to the other half of their property.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39345591-eager
There was an interesting lawsuit a while ago about how newer cars use a plastic for the wire insulation that's alledgedly more attractive to rodents, although I don't recall the outcome.
https://www.mountainproject.com/photo/105869551/porcupine-ba...