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.
The gophers subsist mostly on roots encountered in the tunnels that the rodents excavate. But the local terrain doesn’t always provide enough roots to sustain gophers, two researchers report in the July 11 Current Biology. To make up the deficit, the gophers practice a simple type of agriculture by creating conditions that promote more root growth, suggest ecologist Jack Putz of the University of Florida in Gainesville and his former zoology undergraduate student Veronica Selden.
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