Beavers finish seven-year dam project in two days saving – $1M
47 comments
·February 10, 2025lolinder
> The largest beaver dam on record is in Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada, stretching the length of seven football fields. The dam is so big, it can be seen from space.
And from the linked article:
> The world’s largest beaver dam is visible from space in satellite images.
I would have thought that by now "visible from space" would have lost its charm as a point of comparison. My mailbox is visible from space in satellite images. I have no doubt this dam is too, but that doesn't really mean much at this point.
SteveNuts
I've always taken it to mean "visible to the naked eye from space", not through a satellite telescope.
userbinator
How far from the earth is "space"?
dijit
62 miles, or 100km
Its known as the Kármán line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line
SteveNuts
This is simply a thing "in my minds eye" but roughly what you'd see in a picture from something like the ISS I suppose.
lolinder
Yeah, I've always wished for it to be used that way only, but most often when I see it now it's like in TFA: visible in a satellite image.
imglorp
The point is, big.
I've seen a "small" dam in person, which was about 2m high and 10m wide. Such remarkable animals. They need to have a long term plan involving the topography and where the water will be when they're finished and where the lodge will be at that water level. Site selection is critical. Then they have to implement it one limb at a time, by felling whole trees and limbing and transporting them. And the stamina to do this day after day, year after year. Solid engineering and PM work.
not_your_mentat
And to think that they do it because the sound of running water seems to irritate them. Maybe it's time we start hiring for irritability instead of passion. XD
flenserboy
The origin of TeX!
HPsquared
My favourite "visible from space" object (more a manmade geographical feature) is the Hambach surface mine in Germany, home of the Bagger 288.
If you zoom out and look at all of Europe in Google Earth with labels disabled, it's clearly visible as a large bright spot in the Rhineland.
nickdothutton
One of these days I'm going to write up a blog post about releasing millions of ants into a scale model of London and allowing them to figure out the most efficient traffic routes for us.
aqme28
They've used slime molds for that. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/feb/18/slime-mould-r...
snakeyjake
That and the Tokyo train network slime mold experiments have always irrationally angered me.
They haven't found the most efficient paths, for humans in the real world, at all. They've found short-ISH paths that are efficient for a slime mold attempting to conserve energy.
Just look at the god damned photo!
What the hell is wrong with people?
Do they honestly believe that building an interstate highway along the actual, literal, spine of the Rocky Mountains, practically from peak-to-peak along the most mountainous and difficult terrain in North America, is "efficient"?
Slime molds are not intelligent.
Slime molds cannot make decisions.
Slime molds do not hold any insight into the human condition, especially when it comes to engineering.
Slime molds are simple biological machines who have been selected over billions, yes billions, of years to grow in the most sustainable way possible.
And don't get me started on the Tokyo railway one. Only the highest of the most stoned biology students could look at that picture and say, "this resembles what humans built". It's like looking at a cartoon rendering of a stereotypical Saguaro cactus and saying, "this looks like a man holding his arms up just put a cowboy hat on him and call him Tex".
fastasucan
No reason to release the ants, just code just make a model and solve it with Ant Colony Optimization Algortihm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algo...
pjc50
They'd take the tube.
SideburnsOfDoom
So just like the pigeons then.
https://www.mylondon.news/news/nostalgia/london-underground-...
gruez
I never got the point of "experiments" like these. Is there any reason to think that "releasing millions of ants" is going to be more efficient than using semiconductors that can perform tens of billions of calculations per second? It's not even that ants are smart. For instance you can emulate a flood fill algorithm with a bucket of water, but it's pretty clear that bucket of water doesn't have any intelligence.
bjord
either way, the ants are more fun
short_sells_poo
I posit they'll find out that living inside London is terrible and they'll all move to the location that'd be Surrey. Turning that area terrible in turn.
theoreticalmal
What are you implying about the current residents of Surrey?
aptsurdist
Photo or it didn’t happen. In serious, I was sad there wasn’t a photo or at least discussion of the scale and details of the project.
jt2190
victorbjorklund
So a very tiny dam that probably will fail at some point (which might not be bad).
TeMPOraL
But it might be enough to reclassify the project from a new construction to something else that doesn't require negotiating so many permits.
bbarnett
Environmentalists who inspected the work say that the wetland and pools that the beavers created, will offer good conditions for the rare stone crayfish, frogs and other species that thrive on wetlands.
But... dams are bad, I was told.
fastasucan
Human made dams are not always comparable with bever dams, to say the least. The wildlife have learned to coexist with beavers. Human dams on the other hand can be a lot larger, not allow for emigration, drain large areas and van themselves be drained.
vijaybritto
Beaver dams are like step dams. The bad ones people talk about are the huge dams which alter the environment drastically often creating artificial lakes.
Beaver dams on the other hand slow down water flow to some extent and alter the direction of water flow slightly. These smaller natural dams are so good for little species to thrive.
nmeofthestate
"you* can just do things"
*a beaver
squigz
Are people actually unironically sharing this, as if to make some kind of point? Do we really believe a dam built by a beaver (sorry; multiple beavers) is comparable to a man-made dam?
quesera
I think you don't know much about beavers?
It's a bit tricky to get beavers to build dams where humans want them, but this story is about beavers that did exactly that. It doesn't scale, but it worked here. No irony needed.
Once built, a good dam is a good dam. Beavers don't build bad dams. They do, however, ravage the local forest.
But beavers are better dam maintainers than humans are. More reliable and less expensive.
I've lived in an area where beaver dams created the ponds on either side of a long road. If the dams failed, the (dirt) road could be washed out. In huge water events, the only dams that failed were the man-made ones. Even if they failed equally, the beaver dams would win for lower cost.
squigz
> It's a bit tricky to get beavers to build dams where humans want them, but this story is about beavers that did exactly that. It doesn't scale, but it worked here. No irony needed.
It worked here by luck, indeed. The irony comes in when people share this story as some kind of gotcha against government spending and regulations regarding projects like this - as if "Haha, see silly government, all you need is some beavers to build dams" is a logical position to take.
> Once built, a good dam is a good dam.
Well... no, because such things need maintenance. Beavers, being animals, don't really have a concept of "round the clock maintenance" or "replacing maintenance workers". Again I ask, what happens when those beavers die?
> Beavers don't build bad dams. Beavers are better dam maintainers than humans are.
Citation needed.
> More reliable and less expensive.
I'll grant you that it's less expensive. That's not inherently a good thing, if you're sacrificing quality/safety/etc
quesera
Beavers maintain their dams. Abandoned dams are reclaimed by other beavers, quickly. They are more trustworthy than municipal budgets, by far.
I've lived with beavers for a long time. If you and a beaver agree on the location of a dam, you should be grateful because they will do all the work.
nsxwolf
Is there nothing to learn about dam construction from beavers? Is there not a 3.5 year beaver-inspired project that could be done cheaper?
squigz
> Is there nothing to learn about dam construction from beavers?
I have to imagine whatever we might learn about dam construction from beavers, we've done so.
> Is there not a 3.5 year beaver-inspired project that could be done cheaper?
Maybe, but it's still not really relevant that beavers made a dam themselves.
jrochkind1
In this case the planned dam was not for power generation but for wetlands restoration. I can believe that a beaver-made dam can accomplish that purpose apprxoimately as a man-made one would, and obviate the need for the man-made one, sure. It's obviously dissimilar in many ways too, of course.
squigz
I cannot. Beavers are following biological instincts, not logic. Their dam may not be in the best place, or may fall apart in a short while. What happens when those beavers leave/die?
jrochkind1
Do you know much about beaver dams?
booleandilemma
Without project managers? Jira tickets? Groomings? How is this possible? Did they have a retro?
hagbard_c
[flagged]
Previous discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42938802
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42965551
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42977457