The eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 scattered roughly 540 million tons of ash over an area of more than 22,000 square miles (57,000 square kilometers), according to the USGS. This blistering blast of lava incinerated life in the area, scorching the earth and turning the land to pumice. Researchers theorized that gophers could help restore the area, because they excavate beneficial microbes like bacteria and fungi.
Scientists decided to test this theory by briefly depositing gophers in the region about two years after the eruption, but for only 24 hours. They turned out to be incredibly beneficial to recovery. According to work recently reported in Frontiers in Microbiology, these benefits, from only one day, can still be seen now. The work compared areas where the gophers were deposited to places where there were no gophers introduced. The presence of the animals seems to have made lasting changes to the soil microbiome.
“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,” explained study co-author and University of California Riverside (UCR) microbiologist Michael Allen. “In the 1980s, we were just testing the short-term reaction. Who would have predicted you could toss a gopher in for a day and see a residual effect forty years later?”
In 1983, Allen and colleague James McMahon took a helicopter to a location that had been affected by lava flow. On these pumice plots, there were few plants at the time, and while some seeds had been deposited by birds, the seedlings were struggling…