Gophers on the Loose at Mount St. Helens – See the 40-Year Impact That No One Expected!

When Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, it unleashed lava, ash, and debris, leaving a barren, desolate landscape in its wake. Scientists predicted that regrowth would be a long, difficult process. However, one team had an idea that bordered on unconventional: what if they could help jumpstart the recovery by sending a few gophers to the scene?

At the time, plant life was struggling to reclaim the area, blanketed in a thick layer of pumice fragments. The eruption had destroyed the topsoil, but researchers believed that beneath the scorched surface lay soil rich with bacteria, fungi, and other essential microorganisms. These elements, they suspected, could still hold the potential to rejuvenate the devastated landscape.

“Soil microorganisms regulate nutrient cycling, interact with many other organisms, and therefore may support successional pathways and complementary ecosystem functions, even in harsh conditions,” explained a team of researchers in a recent paper. Their belief: if these microbes could somehow be brought to the surface, they might kickstart the regrowth process.

University of California Riverside microbiologist Michael Allen, who co-authored the study, pointed out a key player in this underground ecosystem. “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,” he said. “The fungi transport these things to the plant and get carbon they need for their own growth in exchange.”

The researchers believed that gophers—often seen as pests—could serve a valuable role. By burrowing through the pumice and bringing old soil to the surface, these small mammals might help spread bacteria and fungi across the barren landscape. It was a wild idea, but one worth trying.

Just two years after the eruption, scientists placed local gophers into small, enclosed areas around Mount St. Helens, giving them a single day to dig and explore. While the gophers couldn’t understand the larger purpose of their work, the impact of their brief activity was remarkable. Six years later, where the gophers had dug, more than 40,000 plants were thriving, while much of the surrounding land remained largely bare.

Looking back on the scene more than 40 years later, the researchers found an impressive legacy in these gopher-occupied plots. “Plots with historic gopher activity harbored more diverse bacterial and fungal communities than the surrounding old-growth forests,” they explained. “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.”

Reflecting on the experiment, Allen marveled at its success: “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 40 years later?”

Yet while the gophers played a crucial role, the true stars of this recovery story are the fungi. Immediately after the eruption, researchers feared that surrounding pine and spruce forests would face a long road to recovery, their needles thickly coated in ash. Surprisingly, these trees bounced back quickly—thanks once again to fungi.

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“These trees have their own mycorrhizal fungi that picked up nutrients from the dropped needles and helped fuel rapid tree regrowth,” said UCR environmental microbiologist and study co-author Emma Aronson. “The trees came back almost immediately in some places. It didn’t all die like everyone thought.”

When the scientists compared this rebounded forest to a nearby area that had been recently clearcut, they found stark differences. The clearcut land, stripped of its needle-rich soil layer, showed little sign of regrowth. “There still isn’t much of anything growing in the clearcut area,” Aronson noted. “It was shocking looking at the old growth forest soil and comparing it to the dead area.”

In the end, the gophers’ brief visit to Mount St. Helens proved transformative, helping set the stage for a flourishing, diverse ecosystem. But perhaps the greatest lesson comes from nature’s invisible workforce—the fungi—who quietly restored life to the land. This remarkable study, published in Frontiers in Microbiomes, reveals the intricate, interconnected roles that both animals and fungi play in ecosystem recovery.