You are so welcome

Thanks for watching, Ulrich and Susan. Hope you had a great holiday season.

They definitely do that, but I have never seen it.

The ones in my back yard would poop on the yard. It's funny because they make little turds of sawdust. I never directly saw them... ahem... "recycle" but the poops never seemed to stick around for very long.

Poop is eaten especially by young beavers. It facilitates the transfer of the vital microbiota from the parents to the offspring. Beaver diet is largely made out of cellulose which is the same stuff as the dietary fibre we need to eat. Cellulose is basically a really long chain of carbohydrates which in turn are a long chain of sugars, which are the basic blocks of energy. So there's massive amounts of dietary energy in the cellulose, but ONLY if you can digest it to make use of it. No mammals can digest it on their own but herbivores use their gut bacteria to break down the cellulose into accessible carbohydrates and sugars and then use the carbohydrates and sugars as their energy source. The bacterial digestion also results in some proteins and necessary fatty acids and vitamins, that's how the beavers can get everything they need from the woody diet. They have a symbiotic relationship with the gut bacteria but they're not born with it, they need to acquire it by eating the poop of a healthy beaver. Same principle is used in the medical fecal transplants that are currently approved for the treatment of a few illnesses and there's research into using it to treat all kinds of things from depression to colon cancer, because even in humans the gut microbiome plays a huge role.

There are no lily pads around the beaver families I follow and film. I know beavers eat lily pads where they are present, but I just let that be covered as aquatic plants since we don’t have any.

@@mikesvideosofbeavers Many of the ponds I see do not have lily pads either, but for the ones that do beaver thrive on them. They seem to get really fat and silky. Where there is nothing but hardwood bark to eat they put down a lot of trees, but with an abundance of lily pads they don't cut nearly as many trees. I guess they just cut wood to sharpen their teeth. Some of the lily pad ponds don't look there are many beaver, but it will fool you.

Thank you for the video. Very informative and so adorable.

I don't know if all beavers do, but the beaver family I watch seems to think they are a great treat.

Fence off your trees.

I know there is 1 video of a beaver eating a fish. It was likely a rabid beaver or a sick or starving beaver. Beavers are strict herbivores. A beaver eating a fish was likely very sick and acting unnaturally, or simply starving and desperate.

@@mikesvideosofbeaversinteresting