Abstract
Introduced North American beavers Castor canadensis pose a potential threat to the continuing recovery of Eurasian beaver C. fiber populations in several European countries. For management purposes, it is necessary to be able to identify and distinguish the two species. This, however, is difficult because the two species are morphologically, ecologically and behaviourally similar. To find a method for species identification, we examined the possibility of using anal gland secretion (AGS) collected from the two beaver species. We asked 20 inexperienced volunteers to inspect the colour and viscosity of the AGS. When we provided the volunteers with the sex of each beaver and descriptions of the colour and viscosity of AGS from males and females of the two species, all volunteers could 100% correctly identify the two species. We therefore conclude that the colour and viscosity of the AGS can be used for a quick and easy identification of the two beaver species.
Highlights
Short communication articles are short scientific entities often dealing with methodological problems or with byproducts of larger research
Colour and viscosity of the anal gland secretion (AGS) of Eurasian and North American beavers The AGS characteristics of our samples were according to earlier findings
Several researchers have noticed the sexual dimorphism in colour and viscosity of AGS in the Eurasian beaver (Owesen 1979, Grønnberg & Lie 1984, Valeur 1988) and the North American beaver (Allred 1986, Schulte et al 1995)
Summary
Since beavers are capable of undergoing long-distance dispersal (Sun, Müller-Schwarze & Schulte in press) time may be the only problem before the North American beavers in Finland invade other Nordic countries. It has become a major task for wildlife managers there to prevent this from happening (Nummi 1996). The lipid composition, colour, viscosity and odour of anal gland secretion (AGS) can be used for sexing beavers (Grønneberg 1979, Grønneberg & Lie 1984, Schulte, Müller-Schwarze & Sun 1995). We examined the possibility of using the colour and viscosity of the AGS as a quick and easy way to identify and distinguish the two beaver species
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