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

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

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

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

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

“Bringing it in there was like bringing in a mini-ecosystem just for a short period of time,” says lead author Mia Maltza soil microbial ecologist at the University of Connecticut, la A new scientistthis is james dinneen.

Scientists hoped that gophers would help restore the ecosystem with their natural digging and defecation activities, which would fertilize and aerate the soil and bring in microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi. Although burrowing rodents are often considered pests“we thought they would take old soil, move it to the surface, and that’s where the recovery would take place,” Allen explained in the statement.

Previous research has shown what these animals are like ecosystem engineers. In a 2022 studygophers have been described as making “farming” simple. They turned over soil through tunnels, dispersed their waste in their burrows – a form of fertilizer – and harvested roots for food, showing how their lifestyle can promote rich soils and root production.

“Gophers shape plants as well as soil.” Francis (Jack) Putzsaid a University of Florida biologist who worked on the 2022 research National Geographicit’s Sofia Quaglia at the time.

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

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

“With the exception of a few weeds, there is no way that most plant roots are efficient enough to get all the nutrients and water they need on their own,” Allen says in the statement. “The fungi transport these things to the plant and in return get the carbon they need for their own growth.”

Although the impact of gophers seems to have taken a long time, building rich soils takes much longer. For Miranda Hartbiologist at the University of British Columbia in Canada, 40 years is a blink of an eye, she says A new scientist.

“These are still fresh, babies, newborn soils,” she adds.

The study also described other microorganisms that helped restore an ancient forest on the volcano. After the forest was covered in ash, the needles of the trees fell, and scientists worried that the forest would collapse. But pine, spruce and Douglas firs had their own type of mycorrhizal fungi that collected nutrients from fallen needles, helping the trees grow quickly.

Elsewhere on the mountain, where loggers had trees cut before the eruption, the area remains barren.

The gophers’ one-day effort underscores how different parts of an ecosystem are interdependent, especially in landscapes devastated by natural disasters. The team effort between these rodents and invisible mycorrhizal fungi helped restore habitat following the most disastrous volcanic eruption in US history.