When Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, the lava burned the whole lot habitable for miles around. As an experiment, scientists dropped gophers onto parts of a scorched mountain for just 24 hours. The advantages of that at some point were undeniable — and still visible 40 years later.
Once the spewing explosion of ash and debris cooled, scientists theorized that, by digging up useful bacteria and fungi, the gophers could help regenerate lost plant and animal life on the mountain. are Two years after the eruption, they tested this theory.
“They're often thought of as pests, but we thought they'd take old soil, move it to the surface, and that would be where the restoration would take place,” said UC Riverside's Michael Allen.
They were right. But scientists didn’t expect that the advantages of this experiment would still be visible within the soil in 2024. A paper published within the journal this week describes sustainable changes in communities of fungi and bacteria where gophers were, versus nearby land where they were never introduced.
“In the 1980s, we were only testing short-term responses,” said UCR microbiologist Michael Allen. “Who would have predicted that you could toss a gopher for a day and see a residual effect 40 years later?”
In 1983, Allen and James McMahon of Utah State University flew by helicopter to an area where lava had turned the bottom right into a falling slab of porous pumice. At the time, there have been only a few dozen plants that had learned to continue to exist these slabs. A couple of seeds were dropped by the birds, however the seeds struggled in consequence.
After scientists dropped just a few local gophers onto two pumice plots for a day, the land burst with latest life once more. Six years after the experiment, 40,000 plants were thriving on the gopher plots. The untouched land remained mostly barren.
All this is feasible due to what will not be all the time visible to the naked eye. Mycorrhizal fungi penetrate plant root cells to exchange nutrients and resources. They can assist protect plants from pathogens within the soil, and critically, by providing nutrients in arid places, they assist plants establish themselves and survive.
“With the exception of a few herbs, there is no way that the roots of most plants are efficient enough to take up all the nutrients and water they need. Fungi transport these things to the plant and, in turn, provide the nutrients it needs to grow. gets carbon,” Allen said.
Another aspect of this study further indicates how essential these microbes are to the regrowth of flowers after a natural disaster. On one side of the mountain was an old forest. Ash from the volcano covered the trees, trapping solar radiation and overheating pines, spruces, and Douglas-firs causing needles to drop. Scientists fear that the lack of needles will cause the forest to collapse.
It didn't occur. “These trees have their own mycorrhizal fungi that obtain nutrients from the dropped needles and help the trees grow faster,” said Emma Aronson, a UCR environmental microbiologist and co-author of the paper. “In some places the trees came back almost immediately. They didn't all die like everyone thought.”
On the opposite side of the mountain, scientists visited a forest that had been cleared before the eruption. Logging had removed all of the trees on the acre, so there have been no fallen needles to feed the soil fungi naturally.
“There's still not much growing in the clearcut area,” Aronson said. “Looking at the old growth forest soil and comparing it to the dead area was shocking.”
The findings underscore how much there’s to find out about saving endangered ecosystems, said study lead creator and University of Connecticut mycologist Mia Maltz, who was a postdoctoral scholar in Aronson's lab at UCR when the study was conducted. began
“We can't ignore the interdependence of all things in nature, especially things we can't see like microbes and fungi,” Maltz said.