23/01/2026
Sounds crazy but here you go........
Gophers on mission to save a mountain
In 1980, Washington State’s Mount St Helens erupted, resulting in 57 human deaths, the most ever recorded for a volcanic eruption in the US, and the deaths of thousands of animals in the area. Source: IFL Science
As well as the human tragedy, the eruption caused an ecological nightmare as the volcano spewed lava, ash, and debris over the surrounding landscape. The avalanche was followed by mudflows and pyroclastic flows, leaving the vegetation covered in mud and detritus as far as 27 kilometres from the volcano.
It was clear from the start that recovery would take decades. But one team of scientists had an unconventional idea to help jumpstart the process: send a few gophers on a one-day mission to the mountain. So, why gophers?
“Gophers are known as ‘fossorial species,’ meaning ‘hole diggers’,” a team studying the effects of this excursion wrote in a 2024 paper assessing the long-term effects of the rodents at Mount St Helens, adding, “a single gopher can move 227 kg [500 pounds] of soil per month, with gopher populations translocating 38,000 kg [83,780 pounds] of soil per acre per year”.
Digging, it turns out, is a pretty useful quality in restoring an area devastated by volcanic eruption. Plant life was struggling to return to Mount St Helens as it was now under a layer of pumice fragments. But while the top layers of soil were destroyed by the eruption and lava flows, the soil underneath could still have been rich in bacteria and fungi.
“Soil microorganisms regulate nutrient cycling, interact with many other organisms, and therefore may support successional pathways and complementary ecosystem functions, even in harsh conditions,” the researchers explained in their paper.
“With the exception of a few weeds, there is no way most plant roots are efficient enough to get all the nutrients and water they need by themselves,” explained study co-author University of California Riverside microbiologist Michael Allen, in a statement. “The fungi transport these things to the plant and get carbon they need for their own growth in exchange.”
After the eruption, researchers believed gophers could be ideal for returning it all to the top, promoting new plant growth.
“They’re often considered pests, but we thought they would take old soil, move it to the surface, and that would be where recovery would occur,” Mr Allen said.
Two years after the eruption of Mount St Helens, local gophers were sent on a rather confusing day trip to the area, which must have been a little baffling to the animals, even if they weren’t aware of the recent eruption. In position, the gophers were placed in enclosed areas for the experiment and spent the day happily digging around in the pumice.
Despite only spending one day in the area, the impact was remarkable. Six years after their trip, there were over 40,000 plants thriving where the gophers had gotten to work, while the surrounding land remained, for the most part, barren. Studying the area over 40 years later, the team found they had left one hell of a legacy.
“Plots with historic gopher activity harboured more diverse bacterial and fungal communities than the surrounding old-growth forests,” they wrote. “We also found more diverse fungal communities in these long-term lupine gopher plots than in forests that were historically clearcut, prior to the 1980 eruption, nearby at Bear Meadow.”
“In the 1980s, we were just testing the short-term reaction,” Mr Allen said. “Who would have predicted you could toss a gopher in for a day and see a residual effect 40 years later?”
While the gophers should be praised for their unusual part in the story, the real stars of the recovery effort are the far-less-cutesy fungi. After the eruption, scientists worried that nearby pine and spruce forests would take a long time to recover, as the ash covered their needles, causing them to fall off. However, they regrew much more quickly than expected, thanks to our fungal friends.
“These trees have their own mycorrhizal fungi that picked up nutrients from the dropped needles and helped fuel rapid tree regrowth,” UCR environmental microbiologist and paper co-author Emma Aronson added. “The trees came back almost immediately in some places. It didn’t all die like everyone thought.”
Comparing the forest to a nearby forest that had recently been cut, thus being devoid of the layer of needles, they found stark differences.
“There still isn’t much of anything growing in the clearcut area,” Mr Aronson said. “It was shocking looking at the old growth forest soil and comparing it to the dead area.”
