Good evening.
I'm here to talk to you tonight
about two closely related,
but very different species--
beavers and Aspen trees.
Now I suspect we all
know the relationship
that beavers have with Aspen,
so I'll dig a little bit deeper
to the roots.
Aspen's reproduce asexually,
as shown in the picture here,
by sending their roots out
into the surrounding soil,
and then shooting up from
those roots young saplings.
Now if a parent tree is
cut down artificially,
such as by a beaver, we see
a very interesting phenomenon
in the saplings.
Specifically, beavers
tend to leave them alone.
So it's almost like the
mother tree is calling out
to her babies, hey,
there's a beaver here,
you need to defend yourself.
And defend themselves they do.
In those young saplings,
we see high concentrations
of this chemical,
and this chemical
has been proven
in discrete trials
to be beaver repellent
up to 80% of the time.
Now we don't see this
chemical very much
in areas with no
beaver concentrations.
So if you think
about that the trees
are responding to the beavers.
They're actually
defending themselves.
Now my thesis has focused on
the synthesis of this chemical.
Now if you think about
chemical synthesis
a little bit like
playing with LEGOs.
You have a lot of small pieces.
You're trying to build
them into bigger pieces.
They have rules as to
how they fit together,
but even within those rules
you can be endlessly creative.
The main piece of my molecule
is the central blue piece.
It's a common household
chemical called glycerin.
And the main challenges
came with attaching
all the red pieces and the pink
piece to the glycerin molecule
in the way shown on the slide
and not in a different way.
That would have produced
byproducts and impurities,
which is something
that we don't want.
It reduces the efficiency
of our synthesis.
So I've been
portraying the beavers
as a little bit of bad
guys in this situation,
but really they are very
influential and important
engineers of their environment.
When the beavers are
active in environments,
we see increase fish species.
And they're exceptionally
helpful in arid regions.
So sometimes they're
pests though.
There are areas that we
don't want beavers to be.
We need a way to mitigate
beaver pest activity,
while simultaneously
preserving their health.
And this compound, it's
not toxic to beavers,
they just don't like it.
So employment of this in areas
of high beaver reactivity
offers a solution
to this problem
where we can mitigate
the beaver pest
activity, while simultaneously
preserving their health.
Thank you very much.
