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| Gopher Gold by Stormy on June 20, 2025 How My Dirt-Digging Cousins Saved Mount St. Helens Hello, readers! Stormy Marmot here, fur fluffed, tail puffed and reporting live from the alpine news desk where the grass is always greener (especially when the gophers have been through). Today I want to tell you a tale of resilience, dirt and rodent ingenuity, because sometimes, to heal a mountain, you need a few good holes. The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens was one of the most significant volcanic events in recent U.S. history. The blast left the surrounding area devastated, with lava, ash and debris covering the landscape. The landscape looked like the surface of the moon after a particularly messy toddler got hold of it. Ash everywhere. No plants. No topsoil. Just a whole lotta “uh-oh”. Now, most folks thought it'd take centuries for the mountain to recover, but never underestimate the power of tiny paws and a love of subterranean mischief. Enter gophers, my adorable (and slightly overcaffeinated) rodent cousins. We marmots may prefer sunbathing on rocks and yelling at hikers, but gophers? They live for digging. Tunneling is their cardio. And they make a big impact, especially when it comes to restoring ecosystems. So what did scientists do? They had an unconventional idea – to use gophers to help restore the vegetation. They invited a few gophers up the mountain for a little “dirty work”. No, really, they put them in enclosed plots for one day. One day! That's barely enough time for me to find a snack and lose it again. But the gophers got to work, churning through the pumice and unearthing the deeper, microbe-rich soil like tiny bulldozers with an overbite. And the outcome was straight-up magical. The results were astonishing: six years after the gophers' one-day visit, over 40,000 plants were thriving in the area. Even forty years later, the legacy of the gophers' work remains, with same areas still having more diverse fungi and bacteria than old-growth forests. And the mycorrhizal fungi (which sounds like a pasta dish, but is actually a root fungus) connected trees and traded nutrients like a fungal farmers' market, helping fuel rapid tree regrowth. Meanwhile, other areas remained as lifeless as my one toothed Uncle Scruffy's dating prospects. Now, let's address the fuzzy elephant in the room: aren't gophers considered pests? To which I say “define pest”! If digging life-saving holes that create vibrant ecosystems makes you a pest, then slap that title on me, too! Heck, let's make matching vests. As a marmot, I'm biased towards appreciating the awesomeness of rodents. We rodents often get a bad rap, but the gophers proved that sometimes the smallest diggers can make the biggest difference. They didn't just move soil. They moved science! So next time you see a little dirt pile in your yard, before you reach for the hose or scream into a pillow, consider this: that gopher might be a landscape architect. A fungal whisperer. A subterranean hero in a world that needs all the help it can get. Gophers are ecosystem engineers, working tirelessly to restore and revitalize the natural world. I tip my whiskers to you, dear cousins. The next round of dandelions is on me. Dig deeper. |
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