Ed in Tampa wrote
Wow sure can see nature’s engineers took their training serious. Amazing! Would love to have someone attempt to explained how they learned to do that by evolution! 😂
I can't explain it, but it did prompt me to Google about it. Below is an excerpt that I found from a research study. It appears to be embedded in their DNA and is triggered by the sound of flowing water, i.e. it is NOT a learned behavior (see below). Fascinating...
https://sites.google.com/site/sf11beavers/project-proposal/bibliography/annotated-bibliography/untitledpost
Excerpt:
"To do this, Lars Wilsson had a test group of 4 adult beavers and further on in the experiment, also raised several kits from birth. The young beavers were kept apart from the adults so that they would have no way to learn the behavior of dam building in response to the sound of flowing water. The results of his experiment were quite amazing. He discovered that the young beavers, who had never seen or built a dam before, built a similar dam to the adult beavers on their first try. He further investigated whether it was the sight of flowing water that triggered this dam building behavior or if it was sound that triggered it. The results of this were, again, astounding.
Beavers’ dam building instinct was triggered by merely the sound of flowing water, not the sight. In one of his experiments, a beaver built a dam next to a speaker in a dry tank that was playing the sound of flowing water. The article goes into further detail about methods and strategies that could be implemented that will allow water to flow without making noise, which are implemented in numerous areas surrounding Juneau, Alaska."
