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.