Gopher burrows are full of roots. Does that mean they're farming the forest floor?
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The construction of those long, subterranean tunnel systems that pocket gophers call home present a mystery. Each individual keeps its own network, which can stretch for hundreds of feet, and defends it fiercely. Clearing all that soil requires a huge amount of energy—a fact that Putz and Selden now know much better than they’d like to. “We moved dozens of cubic meters of soil trying to isolate tunnels,” Putz says.
They couldn’t figure out how quickly the roots were growing with the gophers in the tunnel, though, or how much food they could actually provide. And the gophers were almost impossible to keep out while they tried to take measurements. The team started by digging a pair of trenches on either side of a tunnel, then blocking it off with plywood, then with sheet metal—but the industrious rodents always managed to dig around those barriers.
Here’s where things get controversial: Based on those observations, the researchers write, “southeastern pocket gophers are employing a low-level food production system that may qualify as farming.” It all comes down to how you define farming, Putz says. “If your definition of agriculture is based on seed farming, then no, they’re not out there planting. But they’re ecosystem engineers, definitely, because they’re creating conditions that are good for their crops, they’re pruning them, they’re fertilizing them, they’re doing everything but planting.”
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