GIF of a beaver (Castor fiber) grawing on some branches

Today I want to share a short GIF I created with footage from the wildlife camera that I have been setting up close to active beaver feeding areas. You would not believe how little footage I got even after 3 weeks of having them up! So the next time I am working with wildlife cameras, I will probably invest in more expensive cameras that are more reliable. I made some rookie mistakes with them anyhow, so at least I learned my lesson and know how to be more successful the next time.

Anyway, I got a nice clip of a beaver coming to eat the branches of an aspen tree that I figured would be cool to share. This is the first time I have made a GIF, so it was a little smaller than I had planned for, but I guess you can see what's going on.

Edit: It seems like the GIF is not working on Steemit, so click here to see the Busy.org version of the post with a working GIF.

Here's a still photo for those of you who won't bother to go to Busy.

Why I'm filming beavers

I have been working on a small experiment lately where we have been providing beavers with aspen (Populus tremula) trees that either modified to a certain degree. The set up for the experiment is a classic cafeteria experiment where we place X number of food items for an animal to sample, and see which ones it prefer.

Our research question is if the beavers will prefer to eat unmodified aspen with leaves, or if it will select any aspen regardless of if it has been modified or not. You can see it clearly on the GIF where it is standing in front of a "good" aspen, but eating from a modified one that is almost without leaves. The video might not be too good for our results because of this, but at the same time it is showing that the beaver is sampling branches before it cuts down the tree, so this goes perfectly in our hypothesis that it won't care about the aspen with zero branches or leaves.

We have just finished the field work since the aspen leaves are becoming withered, so now it's time to go back and analyze the data. I'm not sure that we got enough observations to get a significant p-value for our hypothesis, but the raw data looks promising.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by. I will hopefully be able to write a detailed post about the project later. It looks like the data won't be usable for scientific publishing, so if that's the case, I might as well put up some original research on the blockchain.