BEAVER NEWS

From the internet's #1 German animal news source, Der Spiegel: Germany's Klausi the Crocodile is Actually A Beaver
Schnappi must be so sad

I wonder if an electric eel could kill it

But the Patagonian forests have proved particularly vulnerable to beavers. Unlike North American trees such as aspen, birch and willow, none of the region’s endemic tree species grows back once gnawed or flooded. Fifty percent of Tierra del Fuego's riparian forests are now damaged by beavers, says Christopher Anderson, a research scientist for Argentina's Austral Center for Scientific Research (CADIC). What's more, the beaver ponds cause rivers to retain 75 percent more organic matter than they otherwise would, altering the watershed's carbon cycle. Once the masticating critters move on, they leave deadwood, bogs and meadows filled with invasive flora. Beavers, Anderson says, are responsible for the biggest transformation of southern Patagonian forests since the last ice age. They have reengineered the ecosystem even more than humans have.
The beavers have also moved into the wide-open pampa, building dams of dirt and grass in drainage ditches. Ranchers trade horror stories of finding sheep stuck in the mud of a beaver pond, their eyes pecked out by birds, or of dozens of trees, planted years ago as a windbreak, felled in a single night by a family of the incisor-wielding vermin.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/argentina-and-chile-decide-not-to-leave-it-to-beavers/

also thanks to Alejandro Valenzuela, conservation coordinator for Argentina’s Southern Patagonia National Parks, for new DN