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slash UK slash AI for people. Science talk will begin after this brief message. Are you ready to fight

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That is, B-E-C-K-M-A-N-C-O-L-T-E-R dot com forward slash S-C-I-A-M.

This is Scientific American Science Talk. I'm Steve Mersky. On this episode,

they eat kind of the inner bark of trees, the canium, They digest that and they kind of, they poop out this viscous black pudding-like substance, which they then re-indgest. And when it comes out again, it's, you know, it's basically like sawdust because they're, you know, their microbial communities have extracted every last drop of nutrition from it.

That's environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb, talking about, you probably figured out,

Beavers. His 2018 book about them is titled Eager, The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why

They Matter. The book won the 2019 Penn E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

and was named one of the 50 notable works of nonfiction that year by the Washington Post.

Before the pandemic hit, Ben was visiting New York City, and we met at Scientific American to talk beavers.

Ben, let's start. You've got to tell the story of the beaver paratroopers.

Yeah, you have to. No discussion of beavers would be complete without it.

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