A gopher pulls an entire plant down by the roots into its tunnels. (Norm Douglas) The notion of gophers as farmers is a beguiling one. Few nonhuman animals have earned the moniker, and they’re ...

Pocket gophers certainly don’t qualify as card-carrying 4-H members, but the rodents might be farming roots in the open air of their moist, nutrient-rich tunnels.

Enigmatic creatures, pocket gophers spend nearly their entire lives below ground in sprawling tunnels up to 500 feet long. Although often thought of as pests, they eat only roots and rarely damage ...

Pocket Gophers May Be the First Non-Human Mammal to ‘Farm’ The rodents don’t plant, of course, but they do tend to roots in their tunnels that they then eat ...

Every meter of tunnel a gopher dug would cost it about a tenth of its daily caloric needs. For a human, that would be like needing to stop to eat a full-size candy bar for each meter dug.

Once in the basement you will see a room of vending machines (best on the East Bank, I might say – try the granola bars.) Just past it there’ll be a sign for the Gopher Way. This tunnel system, with ...

Gophers are master miners, digging tunnels that can exceed 100 metres in length. To keep up with the energy demands of their burrowing lifestyle, one species of gopher promotes the growth of ...

They observed that, in the dark, wet subterranean tunnels the gophers had dug, new, soft, digestible roots grew like stalactites and stalagmites covering the surfaces.

Pocket gophers spend pretty much their entire lives underground, excavating multiple horizontal tunnels that run up to 160 m (525 ft) in length. Their diet consists mainly of plant roots, which ...

W hen Jack Putz and his student decided to study root growth in southeastern pocket gopher (Geomys pinetis) tunnels, they didn’t realize how difficult it would be to isolate sections of the ...

Hofstetter added there are a lot of unknowns regarding the tunnels in terms of navigation and where they are located. “There’s a lot of people who don’t know about the tunnels, and the hope is that ...

Since they prefer to live alone, they will fight other gophers who try to enter their tunnels. These systems have several chambers, and a gopher will run through all the tunnels every day or so to ...