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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

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.

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According to wiki, you're pretty right.

> 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

Reminds me of human's proclivity to fashion pointy sticks first chance they get.

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 ;)

They want to repair the captivity, should be studied further

The doc I posted is actually in part about how they react to the sound of running water, and they show the exact speaker experiment you mentioned. :)

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.

[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...

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