Volcano Damage Restoration and — Gophers?

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Burrowing rodents known as pocket gophers (the pocket part of the name could refer to pocketing food in cheeks) are widely considered pests. Farmers try to grow plants, gophers burrow and eat them. Sometimes they pull the small plants down into their burrows.

We recently saw how nature reclaims urban areas and devastation, so that may have been in the minds of scientists who saw volcanic ash from Mount St. Helens. They took a notion to see what gophers can do to help the soil for one day. The rodents said, "Challenge accepted."

Scientists took a notion to see if gophers could help the soil after Mount St. Helens erupted. The one-day project surprises them 40 years later.
Pocket gopher, Wikimedia Commons / LeonardoWeiss (CC BY 3.0)
Our Creator has designed things to have an ecological niche, but obviously some critters get rambunctious. Even so, burrowing and recycling the soil by bringing deeper soil up and upper soil deep, could help seeds grow. Other creatures got involved in bioturbation, and the one-day pocket gopher project had results that show forty years later.
Reporter Jules Bernstein relates experiments by UC Riverside scientists who tested whether gophers could help plants take root in volcanic ash beds at Mt. St. Helens. They dropped gophers into selected patches within the devastated area two years after the eruption, and let them work for a day, thinking that the burrowing critters might help the land get a start to recovery. Now, in 2024, they have evaluated the effects and were surprised.

To dig into the entire short article, see "Gophers Help Restore Volcano Damage." In this video, how long would it take to dig a hole if the gopher didn't keep stopping and threatening to bite?