Doin’ It Naturally

When Mount St. Helens erupted on this day in 1980, it was the deadliest and most destructive volcanic event in American history, killing 57 people and triggering the largest landslide ever recorded. More than four decades later, the ecosystem is healing. Discover why it's one of… pic.twitter.com/dwfx4gkt6N

— Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) May 18, 2026

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In 1983, when Allen and other scientists flew in by helicopter to an area devastated by lava, they found only about a dozen plants surviving there. Even the seeds that birds had dropped in the area were struggling to grow. In an experiment, the scientists airlifted local gophers, known as northern pocket gophers, to two enclosed pumice plots for a day.

“Bringing them there was like bringing a mini-ecosystem just for a short time,” says lead author Mia Maltz, a soil microbial ecologist at the University of Connecticut, to New Scientist’s James Dinneen.

The scientists hoped the gophers would help restore the ecosystem with their natural digging activities and defecation, which would fertilize and aerate the soil and bring in microorganisms like bacteria and fungi. Although the burrowing rodents are often considered pests, “we thought they would take old soil, move it to the surface, and that would be where recovery would occur,” Allen explains in the statement.

Past research has shown how these animals are ecosystem engineers. In a study from 2022, gophers were described as doing simple “farming.” They turned over the soil by tunneling, dispersed their waste within their burrows—a form of fertilizer—and harvested roots for food, showing how their lifestyle can promote rich soils and root production... 

Something similar happened at Mount St. Helens. Six years after the gophers were brought in, the land they hadn’t touched remained largely barren, while 40,000 plants grew and thrived in the gopher plots, according to the statement.

The secret to life was mycorrhizal fungi. These organisms are essential to plant growth: They form symbiotic relationships with roots, allowing them to access more nutrients from the soil and protecting them from diseases. The gophers promoted growth of the fungi by burrowing and moving the soil around, which brought buried fungal spores to the surface and introduced new microbes.

“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,” Allen says in the statement. “The fungi transport these things to the plant and get carbon they need for their own growth in exchange.”

So we got that goin' for us, which is nice.

<exits singing, I'm alright, nobody worry 'bout me>