Nature Myths, Debunked

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Back to reality. The truth of the matter is that when beavers pack mud they use their forepaws. This is not to say, however, that the beaver’s paddle-shaped tail goes unused—quite the contrary.

In the water, a beaver uses its tail as a rudder for steering and diving. On land, its tail serves nicely as a prop or stabilizer, a sort of portable chair, as the toothy vegetarian sits back and gnaws on trees. Another use of the beaver’s tail is as an alarm: Whap! A sharp slap of the scaly tail on water sends a surprisingly loud, long-range warning to other members of the beaver’s colony. Rich in fat, the beaver’s tail also stores emergency nutrition for lean times. And the tail’s elaborate network of veins and blood vessels helps regulate the animal’s temperature, acting as a heat exchanger to cool the animal in hot weather and to reduce heat loss in winter.

Pack mud? Nah, a beaver’s tail has much more important work to do.

“Bumblebees can’t sting.” It’s the general good nature of the portly yellow-and-black-striped bumbler that’s behind this myth. Given a bed of nectar- and pollen-rich flowers, the noisy but mild-mannered bumblebee is much too busy gathering food to bother with the likes of a bumbling human. Wade through a field of flowering clover virtually carpeted with foraging bumblebees, and your chances of being stung are almost nil.

But if you wander too close to a bumblebee nest—that’s a different matter. Female bumblebees, like the females of any stinging insect species, are equipped with a modified ovipositor, a tube for laying eggs, that also serves as a stinger. The bees can and certainly will sting—repeatedly—to defend their colony.

Fortunately, bumblebees tend to build their nests in out-of-the-way places in the soil, in clumps of dense grass or in wall insulation. You’re not likely to stumble upon one often. But if you do, be careful or you may discover the truth about bumblebees the (ouch!) hard way.

“Porcupines can shoot their quills at humans and would-be predators.” No, but the portly pincushions can raise and lower their quills, and the meaning is clear: quills down, no problem; quills up, beware. It’s a warning that’s worth heeding.

A porcupine is armed with some 30,000 quills—about 140 per square inch—covering its back, cheeks, legs and tail. The quills are actually modified hairs, but you wouldn’t want to run your fingers through them. Stiff and sharp-pointed, they average about 2 to 3 inches long and are only loosely attached to the porcupine’s body. Every quill is tipped with a series of microscopic ringlike scales, each of which has a raised edge that acts much like a fish hook’s barb—try to pull the quill out, and the edges dig in. To make matters worse, the quills expand in response to the victim’s body heat and work themselves deeper into flesh.

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