A delightful new ASME video, Nature’s Best Engineering Animals, highlights some of the world’s “animal” engineers. In the opening scene shows a typical beaver dam, beavers being one of the most determined of the animal kingdom’s engineers.
Here at the farm, I must be ever vigilant to foil beavers from damming up the spillway that keeps our pond at its proper level. One night of carelessness in our beaver deterrence system, and there will be the start of a major dam in front of the spillway that will take many times an hour to clear.
Beavers are so industrious that the last photo in the video states that the longest recorded beaver dam is in Alberta, Canada and is almost 2,800 miles long. The video also talks about 3,000 year-old termite mounts and bird nests that hold up to 400 birds.
I invite you to watch this video and be amazed at what nature’s engineers have been building long before humans got into the engineering game. – Dr. Tom
