The introduction of non-indigenous species is a problematic situation that is present in many places in the world, and is one that threatens with destroying whole natural ecosystems and with the extinction of the native species that live within them. This is cause by the hotel environment generated by these invasive species, when they find themselves inside these new ecosystems with a preferable space for their survival, without any kind of natural predator and with abundant food and resources. This generates conflict with the original species of these places, since they now have to compete for food and for a place to live in.
In our project, we focused in the situation that took place originally in 1946 in Tierra del Fuego with the introduction of the Canadian beaver, and that continues to affect that ecosystem until today. Because of the introduction of the beaver, a great part of the woods of Ushuaia have been devastated by them as a result of them using the trees as food and as materials to build their dams, which at the same time, generated the obstruction of natural rivers and their flooding. Destruction, contamination, floods; these are some of the things that the beaver has generated in the province since its introduction, having found itself at that time with ideal surrounding in which it managed to spread and reproduced very quickly without any obstacles to stand in their way.
Nowadays, the number of beavers has increased drastically, being now officially considered as one of the invasive species of the austral system. Many specialists try continually to propose new ideas that could solve this situation, testing new projects that hold this as their goal, but that haven’t been able to do so up to now.
Within our work, we also proposed to ourselves to formulate a possible solution to this problem, having already investigated extensively about it and having been inspired by others, which could at leasthelp in some aspect of the situation. For this, we formed the idea of a prototype which could, from the sound of the beavers, identify their frequency and send a signal to a database which would register the time and place of its recording so that it can map the position and concentration of beavers in the woods of Tierra del Fuego. The prototype would have the capacity of navigating through the woods with wheels, materials, and systems that would allow it to avoid destruction and every sort of obstacle. This process of mapping would be accompanied by the construction of habitats for the beavers in the zones that figure the highest concentration of them, and in which the vast majority of them would be castrated so as not to allow them to reproduce again without control. This, along other necessary steps that need to be taken in order to assure its fulfillment, we hoped would work as a possible help that could help alleviate the problematic faced by the ecosystem of Tierra del Fuego.
This is the theoretical base which helped us formulate our prototype, and in which our whole project of investigation was dictated:
And this is the presentation that we created to show the problematic, our inspirations, and the prototype.
Work done by: Valentina Muguelar, Valentin Hernan, and Ignacio Cagide