2014-08-19
Explanation
The Joke
A beaver is bragging about his sexual conquests. He says that every time he has sex, he puts a notch in a tree. Eventually there are so many notches that the tree falls. He drags it to a river and sticks it there on a pile. Once the pile is big enough, he gets on top of it. He then shouts: "Hey! I had so much sex that it turned a river into a lake! Do you hear me, nature? I banged my way to major ecosystem change! Uoooh!!"
In the final panel, two observers are watching this display. One asks what the beaver is saying, and the other (taking notes) replies: "No doubt something about the importance of biodiversity."
The Humor
The comedy comes from the dramatic reframing of beaver dam-building behavior. Beavers actually do cut down trees by gnawing notches in them, drag them to rivers, pile them up, and create dams that turn rivers into ponds and lakes -- causing major ecosystem changes. The comic humorously reimagines this well-known animal behavior as being motivated by sexual bragging rather than instinct. The punchline adds another layer: the human naturalist observing this assumes the beaver must be communicating something noble about biodiversity, completely misreading the beaver's crude boasting. This satirizes how humans tend to romanticize and over-intellectualize animal behavior.