Animal Behavior Among Beavers

If a sow bug is placed in a choice tray, and has access to decaying leaves, potatoes, grapes, and sow bug food, the sow bug will choose the decaying leaves over its other options. This hypothesis was based on research stating that a sow bug's main food source is decaying vegetation. This is the food they are accustomed to and therefore will select over the other three options which they rarely if ever would have access to.

As a naturalist, Darwin discovered how the type species interact differently from the species from other locations that were nearby. That discovery concluded to be the proposal of “natural selection,” which is a principle that explains that nature selects the

I disagree with my review because of the following reasons. When I tested I was given the animal the otter, Otters have a personality to be excitable energetic and the cheerleading type, this is not me. However, I was also given the animal the beaver and I also disagree with this because beavers are said to be organized perfectionist kind of people and this is far from who I am. Beavers are very detail-oriented, orderly and enjoy thoroughness I am more of the go with the flow type person and am far from organized. I would agree more with the idea of me being a golden retriever, golden retrievers are very team oriented, easy going and quit calm type of people. And I feel like these are some of the traits that fit me best. I tend to be very

The Omnivore’s Dilemma can be defined as the inability to make a decision on what you should eat (given you are able

You open the fridge, the spotlight shines on all of the food, and suddenly you are stuck with the decision of what to eat. Everyone has been in a situation where they didn’t know which food to choose, to help us understand our options better, Michael Pollan created the book, Omnivore's Dilemma. In this book, there is a certain chapter that stands out the most: Chapter 8. Chapter 8 states all the facts about what the “omnivore's dilemma” is. By looking closer into this chapter, the reader goes back to the very question that pioneered this whole idea. The idea that in the modern world, with such a surplus of choices, how do we decide what we should, and what we should not eat? To give us a better idea of how we got here, let's start by finding out how we got to this point in the first place.

This quality that we as omnivores have is the reason there are so many of us in the world. For humans and other omnivores alike, if there is a natural disaster that causes one food source to be wiped out, we can simply find food elsewhere and eat something else. This is not the same though for animals that rely on a certain food, like eucalyptus trees for koalas. This “dietary flexibility” also relates to the size of our brains. Animals that heavily rely on certain foods have smaller brains, while omnivores who require nutrients from different food sources have larger ones. It is the omnivore’s larger brain that allowed it to create “a complicated set of sensory and mental tools to help” sort food. Our first tool that usually decides what food we eat is taste. Humans can distinguish between many flavors but the main two that help decided what we should and shouldn’t eat are sweetness and bitterness. The first is “a taste that signals a particularly rich source of carbohydrate energy in nature,” which supplies energy to our brain. The second is bitter tastes, “which is how many of the defensive toxins produced by plants tastes.” This sensitivity to bitterness has helped us avoid poisonous plants.

The Point Arena mountain beaver (Aplodontia rufa nigra) is a federally listed endangered subspecies that is restricted to the small area of Point Arena, in coastal Mendocino County, California (Zielinski, et al., 2013). (See Figure 1). The Point Arena mountain beaver is a dark brown, medium-sized burrowing rodent with small ears and eyes, and long whiskers and claws (National Park Service (NPS), n.d.). The subspecies is semi-fossorial, spending most of its five to six year lifespan in underground burrows (United States Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS), 2011). The burrows are typically found on moist and steep north-facing slopes or in well-drained gullies; each burrow contains separate chambers for food storage, nesting, and excrement (NPS,

Today omnivores have a wide selection of food to choose from. It is difficult for omnivores to decide what to eat. Pollan uses the example “The koala doesn’t worry about what to eat: If it looks and smells and tastes like a eucalyptus leaf, it must be dinner” (3). Pollan is using figurative language which requires the reader to use their imagination. In addition he is referring to our alienation with food. We can no longer pick up something without questioning what it is comprised of. Omnivores have a wide selection of food and a koala only has one. Another comparison Pollan makes is “The hunter gatherer picking a novel mushroom off the forest floor and consulting his sense of memory to determine its edibility”. The hunter can

Florida Atlantic University, Dept. of Psychology, Davie, FL 33314 USA [E-mail: wmckibbi@fau.edu, tshackel@fau.edu] The Omnivore’s Dilemma is the latest book by Michael Pollan, best known for his previous best‐ selling work, The Botany of Desire. Here, Pollan has crafted a well‐written and enjoyable  exploration of humans’ relationship with food. The book is written for a lay audience, but is  appreciable by all.    Pollan begins by focusing on a seemingly simple question,

Complete the worksheet writing 100- to 200-word short answers for each question. Format your references consistent with APA guidelines.

And how instinct isn’t always something that we could solely rely on, unlike other animals. All humans have a built-in signal inside of them that guides them towards what to eat and what to avoid. The taste that is called bitter tells us to stop eating a certain type of food. This is good for most cases. For example, plant toxins, which are poisons, are bitter. Avoiding toxins is possible by trusting our instincts and avoiding bitter food. But, bitter isn’t always bad. In fact, it “turns out that some of the bitterest plants contain valuable nutrients, even useful medicines. We can’t only rely on our sense of taste when we choose what we eat” (Pollan 89). An example is of broccoli. Broccoli is a taste that many people actually enjoy, despite it being bitter. And is also actually very healthy. Another example is of how early humans had learned to make tea from the bark of the willow tree because it contained salicylic acid, a pain reliever. It proves to show how our “food choices ae not just dictated by instinct. We can learn to eat bitter foods if they are good for us. We sometimes even decide that we like them” (Pollan 89-90). Although instinct is one of the very crucial traits to survival, it isn’t really something that we could solely rely on for us to get by. And that is why we also rely on our brains to make better and more informed decisions. For example, through cooking, we have managed to overcome to bitterness of some plants. With a variety of techniques and methods, we have found ways to make otherwise harmful food safe to eat. As cooking was discovered, it immediately became one of the most important tools that a human omnivore uses. Not only does cooking increase the type of plants and animals that we could eat, but it was also the turning point in human evolution. In fact, “Anthropologists think early primates (pre-humans) learned how to use fire

.The chapter in Kimmerer about becoming indigenous to place presented the concept of looking to nature before making decisions in life. Nature in the form of plants have been efficiently existing for much longer than humans. The man in the chapter speaks of his ancestors and how they looked to the natural world for ingenuity and inspiration. An example from the passage is when the man’s ancestors had looked to whales for vision in the creation of a practical sea vessel shape for their canoes (Kimmerer, 210). Whales are naturally sleek with fluid movements and it was from these features the canoe was based. This efficient shape of whales is the result of natural selection over many generations. It is this concept of looking to nature that

The American beaver’s selective personality extends into habitat selection as well. Factors affecting beaver settlement include vegetation cover, stream gradient, bank slope, hydrological order, and proximity to established colonies (Alejandro G. Pietrek et al. 2015). Beaver habitats are more likely to occur where there is an abundance of woody vegetation (Paul D. Curtis et al. 2004). Researchers in New Mexico introduced beavers on a river in the Chihuahuan desert, and found that they were selective about which pools of water to live near, and that the spots where they resided typically had increased woody plant diversity. (Isidro A. Barela

Beavers live in both North America, and Europe. They are found living near wetlands, and rivers. A beavers house is called a lodge, it is made of logs, sticks, mud, and stones. Beavers lodges are five to eight feet above the waterline and ten to thirteen feet in diameter and have an air vent at the top of the beavers lodge. Beavers have two ways to get out of there lodge and they are both under water (Gibbons,9-13). Beavers live in colonies with their families and they work on their lodge or dam (Riggs,16). Beavers build homes called lodges which they construct themselves to keep shelter and store food.

It might be interesting to examine why apes save tools for future use by testing how tool using is originated in natural environments. If apes are able to solve more complex tool application tasks, we can assume that their planning skills are developed along with the higher-order cognition. In this way, we may understand how future planning is essential for animal’s survival and benefits their fitness in multiple facets.