Emily Chan
Most plants do not have the ability to get the nutrients they require all by themselves. They need fungi to deliver nutrients to them. In return, the fungi receive carbon from the plants for their own growth.
Gophers help ecosystems thrive by spreading soil, microbes, seeds, and fungi from their droppings into new environments. This was how Mount St. Helens was able to recover so quickly following the natural disaster.
Another key finding from the study highlights just how helpful microorganisms are to the regrowth of plant life. On one side of Mount St. Helens, there were Douglas firs, pine, and spruce from an old-growth forest that was covered in volcanic ash after the eruption.
The blanket of ash caused the needles on these trees to overheat and fall off. Luckily, they were able to bounce back.
“These trees have their own mycorrhizal fungi that picked up nutrients from the dropped needles and helped fuel rapid tree regrowth,” said Emma Aronson, a co-author of the study and an environmental microbiologist. “The trees came back almost immediately in some places. It didn’t all die like everyone thought.”
On the other side of the mountain, loggers had cleared away the trees prior to the eruption. With no trees to drop needles to feed soil fungi, the landscape is still dead over 40 years later.
The findings show that all things in nature work together, and this fine balance keeps our world turning. The study was published in Frontiers in Microbiomes.
