Do Gophers … Farm?
Of all the rodents that Elizabeth Parsons has worked with—among them, mice, rats, and squirrels galore—pocket gophers are “probably the feistiest,” she told me. Aboveground, they’ve got a bad rap for mangling gardens and golf-course greens with their characteristic sandy mounds, and when they’re provoked, they gladly put up their dukes. “They will charge you, even though you are human-sized and they are about the size of a russet potato,” Parsons, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Georgia and the Jones Center at Ichauway, said.
And that’s nothing compared with . The rambunctious rodents spend nearly their entire life excavating and maintaining a series of labyrinthine tunnels that can stretch several hundred feet, where fresh air is scarce and the humidity can reach , says Veronica Selden, a biologist at the University of Florida. Apart from, gophers pretty much never leave their underground abode. They eat, sleep, defecate, procreate, and eventually die beneath the same inches of packed dirt, essentially occupying their own grave from adolescence on—all the while toiling, toiling, toiling to keep their dug-out digs in tip-top shape.
