Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 08/27/2026 5:44:33 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
It would probably be 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 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 43 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, in May 1983, three years after the devastating Mount St. Helens 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.”
Before the gopher drop-off, only about a dozen plants were reported to have emerged from the pumice slabs that Mount St. Helens eruption had turned the land into. But six years after the gophers were placed on two specific plots of pumice for a single day “there were 40,000 plants thriving.” Meanwhile, the area around those plots, which had not been gopher-ed, was still barren.
To see these changes six years on was impressive, but nobody could have imagined that the benefits of this single day of gopher intervention could still be seen decades later. But that’s precisely what an article published in the journal Frontiers indicates. Four decades later, the article noted, the microbial community fostered within those plots, specifically mycorrhizal fungi, are still allowing plant life to thrive in the area.
“These trees have their own mycorrhizal fungi that picked up nutrients from the dropped needles and helped fuel rapid tree regrowth,” the paper’s co-author Emma Aronson said of the fungi’s importance, “The trees came back almost immediately in some places. It didn’t all die like everyone thought.”
Naturally, one takeaway from this paper is, as University of Connecticut mycologist Mia Maltz summarizes, that “we cannot ignore the interdependence of all things in nature, especially the things we cannot see like microbes and fungi.”
But also, when the situation seems grim, just toss a couple of gophers at the problem and see if that does anything. It might just work!
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
"It started as a go-for-broke experiment, but it wound up saving an ecosystem."
Unbelievable Before And After Photos Of The Deadliest Volcanic Eruption In U.S. History
https://allthatsinteresting.com/mount-st-helens-before-and-after
Pinochet dropped communists out of helicopters.
We’ll get there someday. Small steps.
They are like the Viet Cong....Varmint Cong.
Ping.
It doesn’t seem fair. Punxsutawney Phil has it made compared to those gophers even though he’s wrong half the time.
I dont know. If we go dropping golfers onto volcanoes, I’m pretty sure you’ll get arrested.
So…nature works?
Obviously without intervention it probably would have taken longer. But, geologically, this stuff happens often. (Geological time is pretty lengthy!)
When Yellowstone blows it’s gonna take a lot of gophers to get back up and running. LOL
Funny. Gophers? Aren’t you supposed to drop human female virgins into volcanoes?
Is nothing sacred?
Well, maybe they were female virgin gophers. I guess that would be okay!
Instead of female virgins, let’s drop female liberals and trans psychos into volcanoes.
What! Are you crazy? We don't want to make it angry!
On the other hand, it would be the most satisfying pre-eruption ritual in history!
THEY CAN HAVE ALL THE GOPHERS WHO HAVE CONDOS IN MY HORSE PASTURE
You know, when we were kids, my mother taught us six kids this song to sing in the car, and I remembered the lyrics as:
Six quart cans of greasy, grimy, gopher guts
Merculated Monkey’s feet
Little dirty birdy feet...
Now, as a kid, I could never figure out what the hell “Merculated Monkey’s Feet were, but my mother loved pickled pig’s feet (which to me, was the most horrible, inhuman food I had ever seen.) and watching her eat them, I thought if aliens came to Earth and began eating humans, it would look just like that!
Even weirder to me, looking back on that as an adult, was why she would teach us to sing it? (Which we did, loudly and joyfully in the car)
My first thought was, perhaps it was better than “100 Botttles of Beer on The Wall” since my dad was an alcoholic, but it provides a window into my mother. In my mind, there is this little video of her, hair done up in typical late sixties look, her wearing capri pants, and vacuuming the floor as she sang it to herself, the omnipresent cigarette with the long drooping ash hanging from her mouth!
I don’t if that ever really happened now, since she used to do her vacuuming while listening to Tom Jones or Englebert Humperdink on the stereo...but it still floats in my head like that...along with us gleefully singing that song in the large white 1965 Chrysler New Yorker station wagon at the top of our lungs!
Go, go, gophers, watch ‘em go, go go!
Ask Bill...
Go, go gophers!
Watch ‘em go, go, go!
One day? Did they then trap them and, what then?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.