The Eurasian beaver – one herbivore that acts as an ecosystem engineer
The West Sussex Gazette has teamed up with the Sussex Wildlife Trust to bring you monthly questions and answers about all things nature.
Charlotte Owen, WildCall officer at Sussex Wildlife Trust, is on hand to answer your wildlife and conservation queries. As well as answering a variety of wildlife queries, Charlotte is always eager to receive your wildlife sightings in Sussex.
WildCall provides fact sheets ranging from how to make bird cake to beachcombing and can offer advice on environmental and planning issues as well as the best ways to help wildlife such as frogs, birds, bats and bees flourish in your garden.
To talk to Charlotte, call 01273 494777 between 9.30am and 1pm on weekdays, email wildcall@sussexwt.org.uk, write to her at WildCall, Sussex Wildlife Trust, Woods Mill, Henfield, BN5 9SD or visit www.sussexwildlifetrust.org.uk/wildcall
This term refers to an animal that plays such an important role in its ecosystem that the natural world just isn’t the same without them. It stems from the architectural design of a stone arch, which is constructed with a keystone at its apex. The keystone is the last stone to be placed and the most important, since it locks all the others into position and stabilises the entire structure. Without it, the whole arch would collapse.
A keystone species plays a similar role within a natural ecosystem by influencing its structure, function and stability – and the absence of a keystone species can lead to catastrophic ecological collapse.
Many keystone species are apex predators, present in small numbers but exerting great influence on their environment by regulating prey populations. This in turn creates a domino effect, as complex ecological interactions are altered all the way down the food chain, and one of the best examples of this is the grey wolf ’s impact on the landscape of Yellowstone National Park.
Not all keystone species are predators, though, and a great example closer to home is the Eurasian beaver. A strict herbivore, it
When a senior government figure suggested that we could all do the planet a favour by not rinsing dirty plates before putting them in the dishwasher, there was a cacophony of guffaws from political opponents.
The official in question, Allegra Stratton, the Prime Minister’s climate spokesman, is a former Newsnight journalist and must’ve had more than a hunch that the piece she wrote for a national newspaper, which also suggested that freezing unused bread and walking to the shops could help avert a global crisis, would make headlines during Silly Season.
However, she probably didn’t bank on receiving quite as much stick as she did from critics such as Green MP Caroline Lucas, who posted on social media ‘Yeah, that’ll fix it’ and others who accused the government of being out of touch, owing to the fact that only half of UK is a keystone species because of the way it directly shapes and modifies its environment by digging canal systems, coppicing trees and damming watercourses. This puts beavers into the ‘ecosystem engineer’ category, since they are directly modifying the structure and hydrology of their surroundings, and their natural activities create diverse wetlands that wouldn’t otherwise exist.
households boast a dishwasher.
Personally, I took Ms Stratton’s intervention as vindication for the stubborn stance that I have adopted for the best part of a decade, which is to never willingly rinse a dishwasher-bound plate unless it resembles David Hockney’s apron. It’s a hill that I have long been prepared to die on, not because I have ever considered the environmental benefits, but because of what Mrs Tapp describes as a new level of bone idleness.
The way I see it, the dishwasher is the daddy of all labour-saving devices, which means that I refuse to invest anything more than minimum effort when both loading and emptying ours. If we are being totally honest with ourselves, unless you live with an entire rugby first 15, nobody really needs a dishwasher in their home and all they actually achieve is to increase tensions within families up and down the country.
In our house, the act of both loading and unloading our Fairy-approved (the washing up liquid, not the little people