![]() Gophers are loners except for spring breeding season after which females have litters of 1-5 young in deep nest burrows. Burrows over 380 feet long have been recorded! Their burrow systems are quite extensive with shallow foraging burrows connecting with deeper nesting and food storage burrows all with a just a few mounds of soil on the surface to suggest what lurks below! As you can imagine, gophers are fantastic diggers. They avoid saturated soils and do best in grasslands as tree roots inhibit digging. They can be found in nearly any soil type, but thrive in sandy, loamy soils. Pocket Gophers eat a wide variety of plant materials including grasses, forbs, seeds, and roots. Their namesake "pockets" are large, fur-lined cheek pouches that are stuffed with plant materials when feeding. ![]() Gophers have large, fast growing front incisors that are used for eating tough roots as well as digging. Well designed for a subterranean lifestyle, gophers have small eyes and ears, but a well developed sense of smell and rapacious front claws used for digging. The Plains Pocket Gopher ( Geomys bursarius) is the only species of gopher found in Iowa and are unlike any other mammal found here. Today, we don't see much evidence of gophers, mostly because Iowa's agriculture is dominated by large monocultures of corn and soybeans that don't provide habitat for gophers.įormerly a common species found throughout the state, pocket gopher populations today are found in scattered, isolated patches of habitat like some of our few native prairie remnants and Wildlife Areas. Back when much of Iowa's agriculture consisted of a patchwork of hayfields, pastures, and croplands, gophers were a commonly persecuted "varmint". Their large mounds of soil marred perfectly planted fields of alfalfa and made the haying process bumpy and uncomfortable. Once established, maintaining the health of a pocket gopher colony is not difficult.Pocket gophers were once the bane of farmers in Iowa. If properly clipped, nail injuries are minimal. Malocclusions are rare, but can cause serious threat to an individual's health. Dental problems, such as incisor breakage or malocclusions, can occur. Minor health issues common to newly captured animals, for example, ectoparasite infestations or skin irritations, are eliminated during quarantine. ![]() Pocket gophers do not readily transmit disease. Information concerning the biology of pocket gophers and diseases to which they are susceptible is provided as well in this study. Recent advances in the husbandry of pocket gophers now make large-scale laboratory studies feasible. Further, the solitary lifestyle of the pocket gopher allows a model system to investigate parasite–host relationships where transmission rates are relatively low. Restrictions imposed by the subterranean ecotope make pocket gophers ideal subjects to examine the impact of reduced sensory modalities upon communication and energy costs associated with burrowing. The evolved physiological and behavioral characteristics required for life underground render the pocket gopher valuable for a variety of investigations. This chapter discusses the current and potential uses of pocket gophers as laboratory animals.
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