The Deep Weirdness of Beavers • Hacker News Board

Re: The Deep Weirdness of Beavers

#31

Post by daniel-cussen » Fri, Dec 09, 2022, 7:32 PM UTC

fullstop wrote: post #10

kennend3 wrote: post #8

Living in the land of the Beaver (Canada - we have a Beaver on our 5 cent coin even) they are weird animals. I live near a nature trail with a river and you can find the results of there "work" everywhere - cut down trees and dams. Not many animals invest so much effort cutting down very large trees and creating dams. Lived here for 22 years, see their dams, and a LOT of "spikes" in the ground where small trees once…

I'm in the USA and the only time I've seen beavers in the wild is when they are swimming and I'm in a canoe. They must be better at hiding from humans when they are on land. In the water they're easy to spot because of the ripples behind them, and because they often slap the water with their tail to warn others of danger (my canoe, apparently).

No post body was provided.

Re: The Deep Weirdness of Beavers

#32

Post by lazide » Fri, Dec 09, 2022, 9:00 PM UTC

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #23

jongjong wrote: post #6

The Platypus is even weirder because it's part beaver, part duck, it lays eggs, produces milk, can detect electromagnetic fields... Also, males have a venomous claw on their back paws.

This made me ask, "since platypuses lay eggs, they must not have internal pregnancies, but if that's the case, then what causes them to start producing milk?", and I don't have an answer yet, but I did just learn that they don't have nipples and instead they just sort of "sweat" milk. (Also they have no sweat glands?) Another relevant fact seems to be that they don't lay unfertilized eggs. So maybe they do have pregn…

Evolution is indeed random, and barring strong selection pressure (aka animals dying or being unable to reproduce due to specific traits), everything goes.

It’s a common theme for species to widely diversify during good times, then for the variability to dramatically reduce during bad times to only those most capable of surviving in the new and harsh environment. It can lead to extinctions if the variability was mostly unhelpful and core important functionality was lost.

Aka, a population bottleneck - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck

Re: The Deep Weirdness of Beavers

#33

Post by dublin » Fri, Dec 09, 2022, 9:15 PM UTC

Joeri wrote: post #3

To fully appreciate the beaver I can only recommend zefrank1’s tribute: https://youtu.be/s2YXFeraM8I

Of course, Popular Science established back in 1930 that Mars is home to the most evolutionarily advanced beavers in the Solar system: https://www.popsci.com/science/do-beavers-rule-on-mars/

And then there's Buc-ee's the true modern temple of the beaver: https://buc-ees.com/

Truly amazing creatures - and an excellent video!