After sac oil has been jarred for a while it separates into a thick creamy tan color liquid & a dark oily liquid.

Is there any advantage or benefit to bottle separately & use one over the other in beaver lure or predator lures.

I just shake it up before pouring and use it like that. Works great. I never tried to drain off the separate the layers.

Same here.

Kind of like skunk essence. It will separate the liquid from the fatty content. Skunk essence fat has a very high weight density and is difficult to keep it suspended while pouring from a larger container. The skunk glands excrete essence that has been pre mixed and the yellow mustard makes the essence linger longer and hold fast.

Beaver oil over time has 2 basic elements that will separate.The light weight oil will surface and the fatty cream will separate to the bottom layer. This is the material that is kept mixed naturally due to the animals glandular activity keeping it blended so it is ready as needed. This oil blend is used to comb into the animals hair to keep it somewhat water resistant / repellent. If not, it would die of hypothermia since the body would not be able to maintain its needed body temperature in the cold water.

I keep oil from males and females separately, this way the female oil doesn't separate much and male oil is liquid to begin with.

Interesting.

I've never noticed this, but I'm gonna check this out.

maybe it's different with your species but in European beaver, females produce paste-like gray oil and males produce yellowish liquid oil. Even the sac wall structure is different. It's an easy way to define the sex of the beaver in the field, by how wobbly the area below the pelvic ring is. Castors are the same in both sexes.

It's the opposite with the beavers I have caught here. The females tend to have the runny oil and the males tend to be more paste like. I'm curious about why there would be a difference.

Interesting, yes.
must be the genetics.
yours have 40 chromosomes and ours have 48. Fur seems to be a bit different, too

This is one of those things I’ve paid attention to but never stored it in the memory bank. I read Tatiana’s post yesterday and found it interesting, I’m sure as most. Well I happen to have pulled 3 beaver out of a nuisance job today (the dam has to be 10 foot tall, it’s a beauty) , 2 of which were males and 1 female. While I was milking the oil sacs I paid closer attention and sure enough the female was grayish in comparison to the more yellowish males. To me, it doesn’t matter much, seems to smell the same at the end of the day. But definitely an interesting thing to pay closer attention to, merely out of curiosity now.

To me the difference in smell is significant. Male oil is more sharp, cheesy and rancid-smelling (butyric + caproic acid?) and female oil is more pleasantly musky and a bit sour. I think there is a major difference in the fatty acid composition which explains the differences in the smell and physical properties. Male oil is fluid at body temperature and female oil is often thick like play-doh. Also, many volatile aroma substances are derivatives of fatty acids, chemically.

but again I'm not a real trapper and have no idea how to use this information or if it has any value. I don't even know why I'm collecting the oil. Probably to make decluttering more fun for my parents when I'm dead

I never thought of oil smelling different from different sexes, I use the sac oil straight for an attraction for beaver. The sacs and oil I don't use for beaver I put in meat bait, Iam gonna pay more attention to separating the sacs by sex.

Ive never seen sac oil that looks like that grey thick paste in Tatiana's pic.....and I've squeezed out 100s of oil sacs over the years.

I have done thousands of sac pods. Never any grey material. All tan to creme colored.

Interesting.

I still think it's very possible that there is a difference of oil composition between males and females in the North American beaver, because the two species are very close.

Could also be a population thing, with differences between populations. Our beavers are not diverse genetically, most originate from a single remaining population in European Russia (Voronezh), with the exception of two small populations of indigenous subspecies that are failing to trhive.

With our beaver, the difference of the oil is documented zoologically. Female oil is not only thicker, it's not homogeneous sometimes and has impurities such as hairs. Ontogenetically anal glands are involuted pouches of skin with modified sweat and sebaceous glands, so the presence of hairs is not surprising.

The whole thing appears to be poorly studied and is probably worth investigating.

Tatiana, I love your teacup

I noticed long ago that female and male oil from the sacs is completely different. No exceptions. Female oil is more solid and even granular much like vaseline in color and texture and density (although sometimes it can be a little runny). Male oil is brownish and more like 90 wt oil.

I sell my extracted oil to a lure dealer mixed together and he loves it.

Tatiana,
Did you beat that rabbit to death in your kitchen floor?

I saw that but didn't want to say anything. LOL

No. I'm kind.
He was chasing females along the R254 highway and lost his mind. Too bad, the virus people wanted brain samples

That is wild. They grayish i spoke of was close but not that gray. It had a tan tinge to it but it was enough for it to be noticeably different than that of the two males. I certainly have never seen that THICK of oil either.


Boy, if I ever come back as an animal I hope it’s not a rabbit in Siberia lol

.
I have noticed hair in the oil glands. I talked with my dad about that, and he speculated that it may have been because of the beaver's combing. He thought the hairs may have been pushed into the oil gland when the beaver was extracting the oil with it's toenail.

I've never seen the oil sac secretions gray like that. Like Bob said, ours are mostly a shade of brown, more of a beige color. At least that's what mine have looked like, and the male secretions can be thick like that.

He was enjoying a night with the ladies. Died young, probably left offspring, never knew what hit him. Made a career in science as a bonus. No old age, no nagging wives, no mortgage, no health issues, no alimony, no loneliness. Perfect way to go. Yet you guys insinuate I'm mean, and now I feel like I'm princess Fiona

I think the hairs actually grow inside the sacs. Sometimes there are very fine, down-like hairs in the mass, that appear to be half-dissolved or poorly formed to begin with, so I think there are some hair follicles in the lining of the sacs. The difference in the oil could be because of testosterone. Testosterone metabolites (DHT) positively affect sebaceous gland function. It is why men lose hair and have more greasy skin than women. The mechanism works in many mammals, male Norway rats have greasy fur that becomes cleaner when they're neutered. Testosterone would Increase the oil production and possibly change the chemical composition (shorter carbon chains = more runny and more smelly). The fluid oil is possibly be more convenient for territorry marking compared to the thick oil that females of the European beaver have. There's probably a reason for it, maybe because male beaver (at least here) are more involved in patrolling and terrritory marking than females, which would seem logical especially in the spring, when the females are staying with the kits.

Our females possibly produce the oil very slowly, hence the thickness and the gray color from the shedded wall cells.

I actually think the difference in the smell may not be very important to beavers because they all seem to hate each other so much regardless of the sex, but it could make a difference if the oil is used as a component in lures for other animals because of the different fatty acid composition.

It is just my guess, no one seems to have studied it.

Tatiana, a very interesting topic I like your common sense thinking on animal behavior. Thought...Paul mentioned that his Dad thought that maybe
the hairs were possibly PUSHED into the gland. I wonder how the beaver accesses the gland oil to comb it into the fur? AND possibly does the combing toe
actually enter the gland opening and stimulate the oil to flow by contacting the HAIRS inside? Just thoughts....
AND it seems every year I have both beavers, muskrats and... I'll throw skunks in also that have DIFFERENT smelling glands.
SOME of those animals mentioned have a much stronger smell when compared to others....a ranker smell. Here in my state,( besides muskrats in the spring) there doesn't seem to be specific season for it to occur.
Anyone else experience this?

Same here. I never really payed attention to sex of the beaver, generally removed oil sacs when I removed castor and either throw them in the freezer whole or squeeze them into a jar. Some are thicker oil than others, and color varies some, but always a tan or yellow, if I had ever seen any that looked like grey JB Weld I would have noticed.

MChewk,
Yes I have also noticed individuals with much stronger smell than others. In many species at times.

Like Paul I have noticed the hair pieces in the oil when squeezing oil out. Always wondered about that purpose or reason for it.

I've saved many otter glands over the years and noticed that there is an odor difference from otter to otter....same as castor. There is also a color variance in otter musk.

I don't think you're mean, but the rabbit's mashed head and blood smeared on the floor.....I had to ask.

Also, the two beaver feet laying there was puzzling.....lol. That room looks like a kitchen....not a fur shed or skinning room.

My kind of gal!

Nice!

My wife wouldn't nag me about it either.....she just simply wouldn't allow it....lol

And she has skinned and processed deer and cleans fish.

Tatiana, I'll bet his wife doesn't even allow him to use the kitchen blender for trapline purposes.

And who is anybody to say that "filthy ogres that will die alone" aren't my kind of gal?!

But seriously, I like your style. A little story: In the first year after I built my cabin the county tax appraiser came by to figure out what the value was. After she made outside measurements and took some pictures I invited her inside where I was skinning beavers, and had drying boards everywhere around the wood stove. Later I got an appraisal for taxing purposes that was more in line with a barn or out building than a house. LOL

PS...Nice toes!!!!

Here are two comparisons of freshly squeezed sac oil 1/2 gal. size and a gal jug that is probably 20 plus years old. That gallon hasn't been agitated for many years. I have a good inventory of oil so I keep that older oil for a example of what the fatty paste and the oil will do over time.

You can see how much the original deposited oil has separated almost 50 percent.

Interesting pic Bob.

Tatiana, I see the toe pic is gone. No worries, I wasn't going to forward that on to the club. LOL

Sir, have you ever drawn off the top layer and found any difference, even if ever so slightly, in smell?

Ah...back to my original question.......

Ah...back to my original question.......[/quote]

When I saw Mr. Jameson’s photo, I didn’t think it would separate so distinctly. I tend to always use up the majority of my oil so I’ve never had a large enough quantity to sit untouched to see.

Which after poking my head out of the rabbit hole of wonder that Tatiana’s photo of oils sent me into, I crawled back towards the original topic lol. I have always wondered about the hairs in the oil sacs too, but have yet to find a definitive answer to satisfy my curiosity.

I think Tatiana's idea about it being like a hair growing out of an old fellars ear or nose seems right to me. The few hairs I've seen looked like they probably grew inside there.

The oil I got out of the frozen oil sacs is cream colored, I almost got a headache looking for hair! Gonna grind the empty sacs and see if I can find some hair?! I thought I knew something about beaver and smells?

I have found a good amount of hair in the oil sacs I have cleaned. So much so I keep a pair of tweezers handy to pick them out of the drained oil as best I can. The hairs pull out easily, not seeming to be attached within the oil sac. I will look better the next batch of sacs that I drain.

I've also not seen any attached.

I like to put a layer of salt in a glass bowl. Layer of whole sacs then a layer of salt. Keep going till the bowl is full. After awhile everything is stable. The salt takes on some of the oil. Is both an attractant and preservative. The sacs get dried and hard. Run them through my grinder and add to bait. When rain is being a royal pain fresh glands squeezed out in a flat set wont wash off. Not a great lure for predators but it keeps working. Predators like to have a sniff or two. Catch's beaver pretty good. I just make a slick spot on the bank. Put oil in the slick spot and and peel a few willow sticks and toss them on the bank.

Mine either, I can no longer skin beaver on the kitchen table or dry furs in the living room since I got married. Funny thing though, when she wanted to tan some weasels for a project she was doing, it was okay to do everything but the skinning in the house. For the first quite a few years that I lived here, before I had a good shop, I had hook in the ceiling of the mud room to hang a gambrel on and did most of my skinning there, and beavers were done on the kitchen table.

She will wash empty lure bottles in the kitchen sink for me, but I have my own food processor and grinder, I'm not allowed to use hers.

No one will ever agree to marry me so it's not a problem.

mixed oil from males and females separates into three layers (the jar on the left is 2 years old). Female oil seems to have some polymerized/oxidized stuff in it that acts like oxidized cooking oil, i.e. it's thick and sticky and becomes difficult to completely wash off even with soap. It could be a good thing for some applications like when you need a waterproof base.
Male oil is more fluid or a bit grainy at room temperature, like when you cook bacon in some vegetable oil and when it cools down, it goes partially solid. It becomes uniformly runny at body temperature.
The North American beaver can have similar differences, but less pronounced.

Tatiana what do you use the sac oil for?

just the usual. Catch more beaver.

Used some in combination with bto as the base for marten lure, worked fine.

I'm not really the right person to ask, I have no idea what I'm doing, I just play with stuff.

Tati, that's probably most of us on here. Just playin' with stuff.

For me it's just experimenting on a very small level.

My concoctions will all be 16 ounces or less. Most will be 4 or 8 ounce mixtures for my own use.

We can all buy what works, but it's interesting to make our own and have it work on the target critter.