Walt Disney StudiosIn Hoppers, scrappy scientists build a lifelike beaver robot that not only perfectly mimics its biological brethren but is controlled by a downloaded human mind — either exactly or not at all like Avatar, depending on whom you ask. The sci-fi tech allows its creators to get close to the animals they’re studying, but it belies the sheer scale at which real-life scientists are now learning about beavers.“It wasn’t until five to 10 years ago that I started to see an uptick in remote sensing methods for studying beavers,” Emily Fairfax tells Inverse. “A lot of early research was done at the single-pond scale, which undersold how impactful beavers are. When you see it at the scale of hundreds of connected ponds, it’s a much more cohesive engineering than you may have assumed.”Fairfax, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota, studies how beavers affect the landscape, making her a natural choice for a technical consultant on Hoppers (regarding how beavers build and act, not whether birds airlifting a shark in an attempt to murder a development-happy mayor was realistic). But while Hoppers explores beavers’ role as a keystone species, it only scratches the surface of the remarkable ways beavers affect the landscape.Beavers are small, but they work on a massive scale. | FRANKHILDEBRAND/E+/Getty ImagesBetter Understanding BeaversRobots have been used to study beavers for a while. John Downer Productions built a remarkably lifelike robot for a 2020 episode of nature show Spy in the Wild, one convincing enough to earn the trust of a real beaver cohort. Cool as this is, drones and satellites provide the vast majority of modern data about beavers.“When we fly a drone, we can cover 2 kilometers of stream and engineering in maybe an hour,” Fairfax says. “When we walk that, that’s probably one to two days’ worth of work. It’s rare we actually see beavers in satellite imagery; it’s like a little jump scare.”Fieldwork still has its place, but tech can help us wrap our heads around the sheer impact of beaver engineering.“The landscape-scale impact the beavers have is so large that we can see it from space,” Fairfax says. “And drones and satellites can see in bands of light that we cannot. We can see how much photosynthesis is happening, how much water is evaporating.”“The landscape-scale impact the beavers have is so large that we can see it from space.”Robots are still used, too. Jordan Kennedy, a mechanical engineer and beaver expert at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is helping a team at the Harvard Graduate School of Design build a robot that mimics how beavers carve their trails into the landscape.“Beavers have to coordinate their behavior despite being separated by space and time,” Kennedy tells Inverse. “A damming complex takes generations of beavers to build. And they’re dynamic; they go through periods of expansion and contraction as beavers move in and resources are used. My hypothesis is that as they modify the environment in search of food, they leave a long-term memory on the habitat. The beavers can coordinate their behavior across generations because they’re literally embedding their memory of a site’s productivity into the landscape.”The goal of Harvard’s Beaverbot is to mimic how beavers build, which could help us guide beavers and inform our own construction projects.“One of my collaborators went to a field site and dug a short canal, and beavers started to forage off of it,” Kennedy says. “If we can use the cues they leave to each other, we can get them to investigate sites for re-colonization. A big part of my work is logic. I’ve been building simulations where I employ digital beavers on digital landscapes. Some of my simulations can reconstruct or predict where these canal networks are going to emerge.”While beavers are famous for dams, their canal systems are even more extensive. | Parks Canada/J.D. McKinnonLearning & Co-ExistingWhile we all know that beavers build dams, the why of it doesn’t always penetrate pop culture. Beavers thrive in deep ponds of still water, where they can construct lodges that allow them to store food, hide from predators, and stay warm during poor weather. Dams can create calm water where none exists, but stopping a water flow often interferes with human plans.“People and beavers are both very powerful and extraordinarily stubborn,” Fairfax says. “And we both want to live in the same places. But only one of us knows how to use guns and traps.”Hoppers is about a battle over a freeway, but conflicts are often smaller in scale. The town of Concord, for example, has spent years debating how best to manage its beavers, which create valuable wetland habitats but also tend to flood pedestrian bridges and private property. Concord’s initial solution was a common one: destroy the beavers.“Most of our conflict is about wanting to build where they’re building,” Fairfax says. “But there are ways to compromise. We can put pipes through their dams to take down the water level if they’re flooding a trail. We can wrap our favorite trees with wire fencing if beavers keep trying to cut them down.”There are real benefits of having beavers around including better soil quality; pollutant-filtration; and natural checks against floods, fires, and droughts. But this is only true when they’re a native species. In Southern Patagonia, invasive beavers have done what they do — but to the detriment of this wild land, damaging more than 120 square miles of peat bogs, forests, and grasslands. One study, reports National Geographic, calls beavers’ impact in Patagonia “the largest landscape-level alteration in subantarctic forests since the last ice age.” But in native territories that seeming destructive power have very healthy consequences for the ecosystem at large. “People and beavers are both very powerful and extraordinarily stubborn. But only one of us knows how to use guns and traps.”“But as studies scaled up and we understood the benefits of biodiversity,” Fairfax says, “we’ve taken a step back and said, ‘OK, we’re having a hard time with these beavers, but removing them means we’re having an impact not just on this little space, but on the entire watershed. Is my conflict worth that?’”That understanding is making beavers a valuable climate-change ally.“Beavers are a really important nature-based solution,” Fairfax says. “They’re not engineering on the spatial scale of little organisms, but on really big and deep scales. We’ve started using methods, like ancient DNA, to look back and see 10,000 years of beaver presence. They’ll be there through droughts, floods, fires. We’re hoping to figure out how we can partner with them more effectively. Where can we encourage beavers so that we’re protecting our own communities, and build off of beavers’ efforts to create firebreaks that are much larger or strategically placed?”Outside of Narnia, very few beavers really drink beer. | Buena Vista Pictures DistributionFishy PortrayalsThis growing need to work with native beavers rather than against them comes as beavers enjoy a moment in the spotlight. They’ve long permeated culture, but between Hoppers, 2024’s Hundreds of Beavers, and the recent 1.0 release of beaver city-builder Timberborn, they seem especially prevalent. To Fairfax, the appeal is obvious.“We’re fascinated by beavers because we’re so similar to them. Beavers do everything they can to have a nice, healthy, safe space to be. That’s the motivation for all this engineering. Beavers are playful; they squabble — there’s so much about their day-to-day life that resembles ours. We’re fascinated because we’re finally getting the chance to see that. We wouldn’t love them if we didn’t relate to them. Beavers are giant water rats. They had to overcome quite a bit to be liked.”Fittingly, one of the biggest beaver myths comes from pop culture.“Beavers are giant water rats. They had to overcome quite a bit to be liked.”"People think they eat fish,” Fairfax says. “Beavers eat bark and pond plants. But The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe showed the beaver family serving up a plate of fish. When people tell me beavers eat fish and I ask them why, they all say Narnia. That just shows the power of pop culture to form lasting impressions. If you’re making something, do the research, because you’re teaching people whether you want to or not.”C.S. Lewis didn’t bother to consult an encyclopedia 76 years ago, and now here we are. Take notes for your reboot, Greta Gerwig. Because while many people haven’t even seen a real-life beaver, we’re all going to need to understand them better.“We want the beaver benefits, but we get frustrated when beavers do something we don’t want,” Fairfax says. “We’re trying to better integrate them into the landscape. Some of that is modifying our infrastructure to be beaverproof, some of it is planning ahead to give beavers space, and some of it is about attitude shifts. We don’t have as much flexibility anymore to be stubborn. We’re confronting climate change, extinction of species, a lot of things that are not reversible. We have to give up some of our control, and that’s new for us.”Hoppers is streaming on Disney+.