Even your cat's shadow might count as 'ecosystem engineering.'
first arrived in North America, the continent was home to between 60 and 400 million beavers. Streams from the rainy Pacific Northwest to the Utah desert were strung with their dams. The fur trade of the following centuries nearly wiped the animals out, and in their place, colonists built their own dams, replacing the dense tangles of beaver wetlands with quiet, deep reservoirs and plowed fields.
But the scientific idea of ecosystem engineering wasn’t born in a beaver lodge—it came from Israel’s Negev Desert. The pea-size rock-eating snail sticks to the underside of limestone boulders and has a peculiar means of accessing food: It chews through stone to get the lichen living inside. The tiny mollusks then poop out so much of the rock that they literally build the desert soil.
Since the idea entered the scientific mainstream, ecologists have debated what counts as an engineer, given that almost any organism could conceivably qualify for the definition. Does an action have to be intentional, as beavers’ dam-building appears to be? Does it need to shape the lives of other organisms immensely?
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