I just saw a video of a beaver in rehab building a dam at the front door of a house. What is it about their instincts/psyche that makes them want to build dams of all things?
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It blocks water, creating a lake that increases fish in the area. It also provides the beavers a place to nest that’s safe from many predators.
All animals are “hardwired” to build nests of some sort. Birds prefer to build nests in trees, some animals prefer to dig burrows into the ground, and so on. Beavers like to collect piles of wood and build a surface-and-underwater structure like that.
evolution, those beavers that didn’t build dams had a harder time surviving, didn’t have kids, so eventually only descendants of those that had the instinct to build dams and inherited it were left
Beavers like to build nests/lodges in relatively still bodies of water. It looks basically like an dome made of sticks, and the entrance is from underwater. Very good for staying in and not getting eaten by a wolf. It also ends up being a good place for some of the food they like to eat to grow.
If there’s no body of water they end up building a dam to -make- a body of water from damming up a river.
So the instinct is just part of the same evolutionary development that drives animals to do stuff like birds building nests, or squirrels burying nuts.
Why do you shake when you are wet?
Not an answer, but relavent information: I watched a PBS documentary a few years ago where Canadian wildlife managers were using boomboxes that played the sound of running water to trick the beavers into building away from sensitive culverts. The beavers had been blocking culverts in Ontario and causing road flooding/damage. It seems that merely the *sound* of running water is enough to trigger the “build a dam, quick!” instinct.
One of the major reasons has to do with raising babies. Most rodents have tons of babies which grow up quickly. If some of the babies die it isn’t a big deal, since there are plenty more where that one came from. Beavers, on the other hand, have small infrequent litters, and the babies take a long time to grow to adulthood. This makes it important for the beavers to have a safe place to raise their young, which means they put a lot of effort into building their dams/nests.
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