Pocket gophers are hard to see, but you can find them by the mounds of sandy soil they leave in a field. Under your feet, gophers are always making and changing a maze of winding tunnels that are hundreds of feet long.

In North and Central American grasslands, pocket gophers are well known for leading lonely, underground lives while consuming roots.

Now, researchers reveal in the journal Current Biology that pocket gophers meet the high energy demands of their burrowing lifestyle by “farming” roots that grow into their tunnels.

They think that these roots give the gophers 20 to 60% of the calories they need every day.

According to F. E. “Jack” Putz of the University of Florida in Gainesville, “Southeastern pocket gophers are the first non-human mammalian farmers.” Ant, beetle, and termite species are all familiar with farming, while other mammals are not.

Veronica Selden and Putz say that pocket gophers don’t just eat the roots that grow in the tunnels they dig. Instead, they make it easier for the roots to grow by using their own waste as fertilizer.

Thus, the authors suggest that southeastern pocket gophers have stumbled onto a food production technique that counts as farming by stimulating root growth in their tunnels and then harvesting or cropping those roots.

Putz responds, “It really depends on how ‘farming’ is defined. If farming requires that crops be planted, then gophers don’t qualify. But this seems like a far too narrow definition for anyone with a more horticultural perspective in which crops are carefully managed—such as fruit trees in forests—but not necessarily planted.”

“With this perspective, the origins of agriculture included Mesopotamian annual cereal and pulse crop cultivation as well as maize cultivation in the Americas, but many cultures around the world developed agriculture based on perennial crops, many of which they didn’t plant but did tend.”

Root cropping, according to Selden and Putz, may help to explain why gophers maintain and guard such vast tunnel networks. The rows of tunnels look like rows of crops. If what they do really is farming, then gophers are the first animals other than humans that have been seen to farm.

According to Putz, pocket gophers are excellent examples of ecosystem engineers because they turn over the soil to aerate it and bring nutrients back to the surface. They rarely interact with human activities and only consume roots, some of which they grow themselves.

They also out that more research may shed light on the subject of whether gophers consume fungi as well as the relationship between seasonal variations in the energy input of roots that form tunnels and the gophers’ activity cycles.

How their subsurface activities impact the vegetation above ground is not yet known.

“Whether or not [pocket gophers] qualify as farmers, root cultivation is worth further investigation,” the researchers argue.

Image Credit: Getty

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