The lush forests of Patagonia face a great threat: a group of beavers that came to Patagonia (from Canada) 75 years ago with the idea of promoting human settlements and developing the fur trade. However this trade never got off the ground, and the beavers stayed in the forest breeding. Thus, the ten pairs introduced at the beginning have grown to more than 100,000 today.
Beavers, extraordinary rodents
A single beaver has enough capacity to cut down a tree that took more than a hundred years to grow in several days. According to Cristóbal Arredondo, a scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society (a non-governmental organization that aims to conserve the world’s largest wild places), beavers modify habitats to adapt to the conditions they need to survive.
For this reason, by doing so, beavers cause damage to the park of more than 3,000,000 hectares. Beavers gnaw wood to build dams on rivers and lakes, in a part of the world where forests regenerate much more slowly than in North America (where beavers originate). Dams, meanwhile, also have a great impact: they flood the soil in which beech trees grow and drown them from the roots.
Destruction of biodiversity
According to the president of the Chilean animal rights group, Valeria Muñoz, these animals are killed with non-selective traps in which other animals are also captured. In addition, hunting has not worked either, since the population of this species in Patagonia is not fully prevented and controlled.
Therefore, scientists are now focused on finding a solution to the problem of this invasive species, as they are directly attacking some of the most important forests on the planet. In fact, according to Eve Crowley, representative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Chile, these rodents have become one of the main causes of biodiversity loss.
