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How Gophers Restored Plant Life to a Volcano-Ravaged Mountain - in One Day.
When a volcano erupted in 1980 about 70 miles from Portland, "lava incinerated anything living for miles around," remembers an announcement from the University of California at Riverside. But "As an experiment, scientists later dropped gophers onto parts of the scorched mountain for only 24 hours. ...
Once the blistering blast of ash and debris cooled, scientists theorized that, by digging up beneficial bacteria and fungi, gophers might be able to help regenerate lost plant and animal life on the mountain. 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 1983, Allen and Utah State University's James McMahon helicoptered to an area where the lava had turned the land into collapsing slabs of porous pumice.
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