Schierer Space

So I’m in a training class all week, and today during our lunch break, our instructor used the following as an example for why “doing it the way we always have” is sometimes a bad idea. He said “do you know the leading cause of death in beavers?”
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-wait for it-
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“Falling trees.”

I laughed, and then said “In all seriousness, do you have a reference for that, because that has serious blog potential.”

So needless to say with a room full of engineers on lunch break with high-speed internet connections…

Apparently this is the subject to a reasonable amount of speculation^[1]. See the following links:

• The Snopes Forum: One writer posits that any beavers who died primarily of tree falls would have been eliminated from the gene pool. Pretty good thought experiment, but hardly conclusive.
• Yahoo Answers has the scoop: Random bad speller claiming to teach wildlife biology thinks it’s true. I’m sold!
• Pop culture: “Did you know the leading cause of death for beavers, is falling trees?” -Silvia Broome, The Interpreter
• Sebbylite ponders this also
• This is connected to Green Building… (isn’t everything?)
• Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife: Falling trees IS mentioned, but if it were the primary source you’d think it would get some sort-of special mention.

Here is my conclusion: No conclusive evidence can be found that this is the LEADING cause of death in beavers, but there is fairly strong evidence that it IS a cause of death in beavers (which pretty much makes the point valid for the instructor in any case).
I give you the following short article from Telemark College, Department of Environmental Sciences, N-3800 Bø, Norway which cites multiple documented cases of beaver death and pinning due to their unique occupational hazards.

So there you go.

1. Translation: Given the billions of pages on the internet, there were many which related to this topic. [↩]

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Found on the web, Strange Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.