Michael Allen

From pest to hero: Gophers saved a mountain in one day

tomwt — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 17:49:38 +0000

From pest to hero: Gophers saved a mountain in one day tomwt Mon, 11/18/2024 - 09:49 More CNAS in the Media Jocelyn Solis-Moreira | Study Finds November 16, 2024

STUDY FINDS - Like something straight out of a Disney movie, a study finds that gophers worked to save an entire mountain. These little critters dug up bacteria and fungi that helped restore lost plant and animal life to the devastated mountain landscape. Forty years later, the 24-hour gopher experiment continues to yield results.

In 1980, Mount St. Helens in Washington erupted, destroying everything around it. Only ash and debris surrounded the area. There was no sign of animal and plant life returning, leaving the region a barren wasteland.

Out of curiosity, scientists wondered if digging up bacteria and fungi would help with soil recovery, bringing plants and, eventually, animals back to the area. Of course, this would require a lot of digging, so scientists turned to animals that loved to dig.

Gophers are small rodents that usually spell trouble when they appear. Their constant digging can damage plant life and cause soil erosion. These small rodents also chew on everything in sight, such as irrigation lines and cables, earning them the title of pests.

“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,” says study author Michael Allen, a microbiologist at the University of California-Riverside, in a media release.

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Michael Allen

40 Years Ago, Scientists Dropped Gophers Onto a Volcano. Today, They're Tiny Heroes.

tomwt — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 17:39:05 +0000

40 Years Ago, Scientists Dropped Gophers Onto a Volcano. Today, They're Tiny Heroes. tomwt Mon, 11/18/2024 - 09:39 More CNAS in the Media Michael Natale | Popular Mechanics November 15, 2024

POPULAR MECHANICS - It would probably pretty alarming to learn that, in the early 1980s, scientists decided to drop off a bunch of gophers at the site of a volcanic eruption. But don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds.

In fact, according to a new report from the University of California, this particular gopher-volcano encounter proved to be such a net positive that its effects are still being felt 40 years later.

It starts with the eruption of Mount St. Helens in May of 1980. It was the most destructive volcanic event in American history, claiming 57 lives and causing staggering ecological damage. Faced with a devastation that would take the local environment a substantial amount of time to recover from, scientists were open to unorthodox ideas that might speed the process along. So they did what any reasonable person would decide to do and tossed a couple of gophers at the issue. Seriously.

Specifically, as laid out in the University of California’s report, the thinking was “by digging up beneficial bacteria and fungi, gophers might be able to help regenerate lost plant and animal life on the mountain.” So, just two years after the devastating eruption, that’s exactly what scientists did. They gathered up some gophers, brought them to the eruption site, and let them do their gopher thing.

“They’re often considered pests,” notes UC Riverside microbiologist Michael Allen, “but we thought they would take old soil, move it to the surface, and that would be where recovery would occur.”

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Michael Allen

How a Team of Gophers Restored Mount St. Helens After Its Catastrophic Eruption With Less Than a Day of Digging

tomwt — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 17:51:58 +0000

How a Team of Gophers Restored Mount St. Helens After Its Catastrophic Eruption With Less Than a Day of Digging tomwt Fri, 11/15/2024 - 09:51 More CNAS in the Media Alexa Robles-Gil | Smithsonian Magazine November 14, 2024

SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE - In May 1980, a magnitude-5.1 earthquake accompanied by an avalanche flipped the switch on a volcano in Washington state. With pressure suddenly removed from the magma below, Mount St. Helens spewed lava, ash and debris in the southwestern part of the state. It became the most destructive eruption in United States history. However, not all was lost.

On a destroyed landscape, scientists wondered how life could be restored—so they brought in gophers to dig around in specific areas for a single day. Now, more than four decades later, the benefits from those 24 hours remain visible.

Back then, the scientists only planned to test the short-term chain reaction of the stocky rodents’ activity, says Michael Allen, a biologist at the University of California, Riverside, in a statement. “Who would have predicted you could toss a gopher in for a day and see a residual effect 40 years later?”

Allen and others published a paper in early November in Frontiers in Microbiomes suggesting the gophers played a key role in restoring fungi and bacteria in the soil—and the health of gopher-inhabited areas stood in stark contrast to areas where the gophers had never been.

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Michael Allen

The Secret Magic Of Gophers To Help Restore Devastated Landscapes

tomwt — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 15:55:28 +0000

The Secret Magic Of Gophers To Help Restore Devastated Landscapes tomwt Thu, 11/14/2024 - 07:55 More CNAS in the Media GrrlScientist | Forbes November 13, 2024

FORBES - It was a bright, warm and nearly cloudless morning on 18 May 1980, when all hell broke loose throughout much of Washington State. This was when Mount St. Helens, a dormant volcano, roared to life, sending hot lava cascading down her slopes and incinerating every living thing for miles around. Thick clouds of ash obliterated the sun, darkening the skies and fell like snow for days. Living nearby as I did when this event unfolded, I clearly recall how the warm temperatures suddenly dropped as cold winds began to blow. It was like what I’d imagine it would be like to live near a raging Mount Doom in Mordor.

For years afterwards, the decapitated mountain remained barren and nearly lifeless, her trees flattened, although a few tiny plants did struggle for life in the thick ash. But even as the volcano despaired, scientists were making their plans. They were planning to test whether pocket gophers — a widespread burrowing rodent that many people persecute as pests — could help speed Mount St. Helens’ recovery.

The northern pocket gopher, Thomomys talpoides, is a smallish herbivorous rodent species with long, chocolate-brown fur that is native to the western United States and to parts of Canada. Although common, they remain mostly hidden from view as they burrow around in the rich soil beneath meadows or along streams, primarily in the mountains, although they are found in the lowlands, too. On the rare occasions when a pocket gopher does pop up into the sunlight, they rarely venture more than 0.76 m (2.5 feet) from one of the many entrances to their extensive web of burrows that encompasses hundreds of feet underground. They are fossorial mammals: living out their lives almost totally underground. There, they store food and give birth to their young.

“They’re often considered pests,” said the study’s co-author, Michael Allen, a distinguished professor in the Microbiology & Plant Pathology Dept at the University of California, Riverside. Professor Allen’s research focuses on understanding the effects of human activities on ecosystem biodiversity and functioning, and Mount St. Helens presented the perfect opportunity to test some of his collaborators’ predictions about the potential effects of gophers on helping the nearly lifeless mountain recover from her self-immolation.

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Michael Allen

Scientists Dropped Gophers Onto Mount St Helens For 1 Day. 40 Years Later, The Effect Is Astonishing

tomwt — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 18:45:36 +0000

Scientists Dropped Gophers Onto Mount St Helens For 1 Day. 40 Years Later, The Effect Is Astonishing tomwt Tue, 11/12/2024 - 10:45 More CNAS in the Media James Felton | IFLScience November 11, 2024

IFLSCIENCE - When Mount St Helens erupted in 1980, the resulting lava, ash, and debris turned the landscape barren for miles around. It was clear the land would take a long time to recover from the eruption. But one team of scientists had an idea about how they could help speed up the process; sending a few gophers there on a day trip.

Plant life struggled to return to the area around Mount St Helens, now under a layer of pumice fragments. While the top layers of soil were destroyed by the eruption and lava flows, the soil underneath could still be 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," a team of researchers explained in a new paper on the area's recovery.

"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," study co-author, University of California Riverside microbiologist Michael Allen, explained in a statement. "The fungi transport these things to the plant and get carbon they need for their own growth in exchange."

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Michael Allen

The 24-Hour Gopher Experiment That Brought Life Back to Mount St. Helens

tomwt — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 18:42:07 +0000

The 24-Hour Gopher Experiment That Brought Life Back to Mount St. Helens tomwt Tue, 11/12/2024 - 10:42 More CNAS in the Media Margherita Bassi | Gizmodo November 11, 2024

GIZMODO - In the wake of the most disastrous volcanic eruption in the history of the United States, scientists enlisted the help of an unlikely ally to regenerate life on Mount St. Helens’ barren slopes: gophers. Over four decades later, they were shocked to see that the burrowing rodents’ positive impact remains visible to this very day.

On May 18, 1980, Washington’s Mount St. Helens covered 22,000 square miles with 540 million tons of ash. A few years later, scientists unleashed gophers onto part of the lifeless mountainside for 24 hours, hypothesizing that the animals’ digging habits might dredge up beneficial microorganisms and give the ecosystem a regenerative boost—and they were right. Now, researchers following in their footsteps 44 years later are highlighting just how enduring innovative ecosystem-rescuing methods can be.

“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,” Michael Allen, a microbiologist at UC Riverside who partook in the study, said in a University of California Riverside (UCR) statement.

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Michael Allen

A 24-hour gopher visit caused decades of benefits to volcano grave

tomwt — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 15:48:05 +0000

A 24-hour gopher visit caused decades of benefits to volcano grave tomwt Tue, 11/12/2024 - 07:48 More CNAS in the Media Ellen Phiddian | Cosmos Magazine November 10, 2024

COSMOS MAGAZINE - In 1980, Mount St Helens erupted in the western USA, killing 57 people and destroying 350km2 of forest.

In 1983, scientists captured 2 wild gophers, and put each of them on a small, fenced enclosure on the ruined volcanic plain. They let the gophers dig for 24 hours, then removed them.

According to a new study, those 2 tiny interventions have caused benefits to the mountain ecosystem that can still be measured decades later.

The study, published in Frontiers in Microbiomes, has found key differences in the fungi and other microbes inhabiting the old gopher plots.

“In the 1980s, we were just testing the short-term reaction,” says study co-author Professor Michael Allen, a microbiologist at the University of California – Riverside, USA, who worked on both the 1983 study and the 2024 update.

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Michael Allen

How a crew of gophers helped Mount St. Helens bounce back

tomwt — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 16:20:55 +0000

How a crew of gophers helped Mount St. Helens bounce back tomwt Fri, 11/08/2024 - 08:20 More CNAS in the Media Andrew Paul | Popular Science November 07, 2024

POPULAR SCIENCE - On May 18, 1980, the eruption of Mount St. Helens emitted 1.5 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere while its pyroclastic lava flow incinerated virtually everything within a 230-square-mile radius. Three years later, wildlife experts enlisted a team of local helpers for just 24 hours to speed up the area’s environmental recovery. But these weren’t human volunteers—they were gophers. And while analysis later that decade proved the rodents ecologically benefited the area, recent research published in the journal, Frontiers in Microbiomes, indicates their regional influence can still be seen today.

The experiment’s first stage began in 1983. At the time, a team including University of California Riverside microbiologist Michael Allen took a helicopter into an area that the volcanic eruption previously reduced to porous pumice. According to a UCR profile on November 5th, Allen and his Utah State University colleague, James McMahon, then released “a few local gophers” into two areas known as the Pumice Plain and Bear Meadow. While these spaces contained only a handful of struggling plants that likely sprouted from seeds dropped by birds, the gophers were allowed to do what gophers do best for 24 hours.

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Michael Allen

How gophers revived Mount St. Helens after its eruption

tomwt — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 22:53:32 +0000

How gophers revived Mount St. Helens after its eruption tomwt Thu, 11/07/2024 - 14:53 More CNAS in the Media Sanjana Gajbhiye | Earth.com November 07, 2024

EARTH.COM - The day that Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980 is forever seared into the collective memory of the world. An unstoppable surge of lava effectively reduced surrounding life forms to ash within a matter of miles. In an unlikely twist of fate, an experiment involving some resilient gophers triggered a chain of events that initiated the recovery of the mountain.

Gophers on Mount St. Helens
Despair had hung in the air after the eruption of Mount St. Helens. A once vibrant ecosystem was reduced to nothing in an instant, reminding us of nature’s fearsome power. However, in the aftermath, a bold theory emerged from the minds of scientists.

The experts speculated that gophers, small burrowing rodents, could play an essential role in the revival of the barren landscape.

Quite simply, by digging up and redepositing beneficial bacteria and fungi from deeper soil layers, gophers could aid in the resurrection of the mountain’s plant and animal life.

“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,” said Michael Allen, a professor of plant pathology at UC Riverside.

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Department of Microbiology & Plant Pathology

Michael Allen