Recent comments in /f/askscience

brokendrumsticks t1_j54d7bj wrote

Reply to comment by ThoughtfulPoster in What color are cancer cells? by jennlara

What colours are brain, heart, liver, etc cells normally?

I recently started wondering this because someone said “liver coloured” and I think they meant the purple that livers are usually coloured in text books. I realised books have standard colours for organs and now we think those are the colours but obviously they are just for clarity

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FireITGuy t1_j54ba8s wrote

Reply to comment by BettaFishOfRage in Do beavers get splinters in their mouths, and if they do, how do they deal with them? by OldManIrv

You'd still be a vet, just one who works on beavers. Most uncommon animals just get care from a regular vet unless they're in really niche areas. For example my vet also cares for wallabies and kangaroos even though we're in the US. She just happens to be the vet in a small town where a family has them as pets.

Career wise, Vet school, then working at a beaver sanctuary or a zoo would be your career path if you really wanted to work with beavers in particular.

Unless you wanted to really specialize on beavers in an academic sense? In which case you'd likely be working in some kind of beaver research center, and you might be a zoologist or a wildlife biologist in addition to being a DVM.

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BettaFishOfRage t1_j547s8n wrote

Reply to comment by TheCosmicJester in Do beavers get splinters in their mouths, and if they do, how do they deal with them? by OldManIrv

Okay so I've always been interested in medicine in general (as in, wanted to pursue a career in it, never panned out), and then wanted to do at least something related to animals - let's say veterinary tech or something simple to start. I can deal with both people and animals incredibly well, and have a huge sense of empathy.

But then I start thinking about how there are obviously going to be specialists out there who work on things like exotic and less-than-common animals, non-domesticated, and I just thought... are there people that work on beavers? Surely there are.

So to sum up my post - how do you get to be a veterinary expert who works with beavers? What are the steps? And can you name your beavers Dagget and Norbert?

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gwmccull t1_j543c1n wrote

Reply to comment by tknala17 in Do beavers get splinters in their mouths, and if they do, how do they deal with them? by OldManIrv

We used to live on a creek that had a family of beavers. The creek fed a lake that was dam controlled. In the spring, the water agency would raise the water level in the lake and the creek would back up until it was an extension of the lake. In the fall, they would drop the dam, the lake would drain and the creek would start running again

Every fall the beavers would make a half-hearted attempt at building a dam on the creek, which at best would make a large puddle, and the rest of the year, they just relied on the human-made dam on the lake

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