Saturday, March 21, 2020

Beavers essays

Beavers essays I don't think that beavers will overwhelm this area in the next fifty years, simply because of the fact that they destroy their own habitat as they live in it (Wessels 1997). I think that the population of beavers in this area may rise to fairly high levels, but I think that it will crash once the beavers have degraded too much of their surrounding habitats to survive the winter. I feel that the natural carrying capacity of any area is relatively small for beavers, because once they move away from an area, it will take years for that area to become an acceptable habitat again. I believe that we may be experiencing an upswing in beaver populations, but this will be followed by a population crash, which will be followed by a smaller upswing, then a smaller crash, etc. While it may take time before the beaver population is stabilized, I do think it will happen before we are overrun with them. I think the only reason that the beavers are doing so well now is because there were no beavers around for many years before them to degrade potential habitats. This means that every possible habitat location available to a beaver is as good (in the beaver's mind) as it is going to get. As the populations of beavers have been rising, they have been rapidly using up all of the areas they could, as quickly as possible. Because populations were so low and the habitats available were of such high quality, there was almost no intraspecific competition. Now, though, the beaver population has come near to or overshot the carrying capacity of the land. This is shown by the fact that beavers are building their lodges/dams later in the year as well as in sub-optimal habitats (Wessels 1997). One thing which I think will also help the reduction in beaver populations would be a removal of the ban on leg-holding traps (Bernados et al. 2004) in this area. If the populations of beavers are rising and we are worried ...

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