Gophers Help Restore Volcano Damage
How could scientists accelerate restor-
ation of the devastated area around
Mt. St. Helens? Send in the gophers!
God created animals in multiple phyla that can dig. As they burrow and claw their way underground, they spread nutrients, including fungi and seeds, that can begin the process of restoring a lost ecosystem.
How gophers brought Mount St. Helens back to life in one day (5 Nov 2024, UC Riverside). Reporter Jules Bernstein relates experiments by UC Riverside scientists who tested whether gophers could help plants take root in volcanic ash beds at Mt. St. Helens. They dropped gophers into selected patches within the devastated area two years after the eruption, and let them work for a day, thinking that the burrowing critters might help the land get a start to recovery. Now, in 2024, they have evaluated the effects and were surprised.
They were right. But the scientists did not expect the benefits of this experiment would still be visible in the soil today, in 2024. A paper out this week in the journal Frontiers in Microbiomes details an enduring change in the communities of fungi and bacteria where gophers had been, versus nearby land where they were never introduced.
“In the 1980s, we were just testing the short-term reaction,” said Allen. “Who would have predicted you could toss a gopher in for a day and see a residual effect 40 years later?”
Seeds dropped on the surface, some distributed by birds, did not grow well. The scientists figured that gophers, by recycling the deeper soil to the surface and vice versa, could distribute mycorrhizal fungi down to the root zone, allowing plants to get the nitrogen and carbon required for growth.
After scientists dropped a few local gophers on two pumice plots for a day, the land exploded again with new life. Six years post-experiment, there were 40,000 plants thriving on the gopher plots. The untouched land remained mostly barren.
The paper states that gophers, ants, pikas and other “ecosystem engineers” got into action as “dispersal vectors” for nutrients and seeds, and “were wont to move deep organic soil from below the ashfall to the surface, effectively mixing decayed organic matter with the ash and depositing nutrients via physical bioturbation.”
The scientists viewed these results as another lesson on the interdependence of living things, including microbes, fungi, mammals, and plants. God provided for large-scale distribution of nutrients from below (volcanoes) and above (meteorites) for his green earth, with detailed supply chain components provided by birds, mammals, and insects, which benefit one another while performing their roles.