Slashdot Mirror
Beaver Dam Visible From Space
ygslash writes "The
Hoover Dam
no longer holds the title of the world's widest dam.
Satellite photos of northern Alberta, Canada, show that several families
of beavers have apparently
joined forces
to build a dam 850 meters
wide, more than twice as wide as the Hoover Dam."
The Hoover Dam isn't even a very wide dam (1234 ft)... It's known for being tall.
"The Hoover Dam no longer holds the title of the world's widest dam.
Well, given the fact that the Kuybyshev Hydroelectric Station which was built in the 50's is almost 3000m wide, it's been a LONG time since the Hoover Dam was the worlds widest. Given the fact that the Hoover Dam is very narrow for a its overall size, I'd be pretty surprised if it was ever the worlds widest.
My car is also visible from space, via Google Map's "satellite view".
Does that make my 1995 Chevy special?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam
I bet Beaver Stadium can be seen from space too...
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=58.270908,+-112.251972+(World's+Biggest+Beaver+Dam)&sll=58.270908,-112.15071&sspn=1.027008,2.469177&g=58.270908,+-112.150710&ie=UTF8&ll=58.271526,-112.253623&spn=0.016047,0.038581&t=h&z=15
Cheers!
You seem to have missed the $10,000 a day fine they wanted to levy against the beavers.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
I liked the last paragraph of the article "It is thought that several beaver families joined forces to create the massive dam, containing thousands of trees, and took many months to complete it."
Compare that to the article from the CBC "Biologists estimate the dam would have taken at least 20 years to build. It is visible in NASA satellite imagery from 1990."
Non-satellite images here: http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/World+biggest+beaver+eight+football+fields+long+seen+from+space/2991042/story.html
insight through the mind
....And you Canadians always give us Yanks crap about thinking bigger is better....sheesh.
Perhaps they were trying to emulate this which is an 18km long dam also in Northern Alberta. All they need now is to fill their pond with toxic sludge....
Actually animals DO modify their tools too. SOME chimpazees are known to fix the end of their twigs to make them better tools for catching termites. Also, some corvids (don't remember the species) in the wild will shape the twigs to make hooks to get the grups from holes in the branches. When in the lab, the birds would find the steel wire left around and also make hooks, sometimes to achieve tasks more complex than just pulling a grup out of a hole. I don't remember the details, just that it involved triggering a mechanism to get to some water. Those stories were posted on Slashdot. Actually, for their size, birds' brains are way more efficient than mammal brains. You get more complex problem solving in much smaller animals than mammals.
So basically, tool MAKING not just using, is not a special human trait either. Most of the basics of what we like to call typically human are there in nature. We have just had the opportunity to accumulate enough of those traits and polish them to a higher degree. It's a matter of degree more than substance. Though, I think we are still the only ones with a written language (and that certainly is a powerful way of compounding those original traits).
Leave this one to the Chinese. The Three Gorges Dam is almost thrice as long, 2335 meters. PLEASE check your facts before accepting these submissions.
And if anyone cares, here's an obligatory Google map of the beaver dam and here's one for Three Gorges Dam.
I mean, is that new? In Quebec only, a quick search (no more than 5 minutes) showed that 4 of our dams (Manic 3, Manic 4, Manic 5, La Grande) are bigger than Hoover Dam by far. Manic 3 has been in operation since the 1970s...
I coulda sworn I saw this on Slashdot some time ago, but in any case, this "news" is at least two years old...
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/story/2008/04/14/beaver-park.html
The funnier part is the Fox news site has a link to "read more" that takes you to the original story on thesun.co.uk. That page has the exact story word for word but with a different picture. There is nothing more to read though, Fox copied the entire thing..
Funny that beaver dams never break. You would think that since they're made out of untreated wood, that the water would rot them at some random point that beavers can't even foresee....
I don't know if you were joking, but beaver dams break all the time. Usually they're not huge breaches but little leaks, and not usually due to wood rotting but due to mud washing out and sticks coming loose. The little guys are constantly repairing and mending the dams. They have OCD and can't stand the sound of running water -- that's their trigger to fix the dam.
So? Spiders shit webs that are stronger than steel.
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/23446391/detail.html
Roads have been closed and homes evacuated after beaver dam breaks.