The tortoise digs with flattened, shovel-like forelimbs into deep sand, producing a tunnel that ends in a chamber. Inside, temperature and humidity stay far more stable than at the surface, and the burrow does not burn when fire moves through the pine savanna above.
That makes it valuable property. Surveys have recorded more than three hundred and fifty species using gopher tortoise burrows, among them the eastern indigo snake, the gopher frog, burrowing owls, mice and a long list of invertebrates found nowhere else. Some are casual visitors; others depend on burrows to complete their life cycle.
The dependence runs the other way too. Gopher tortoises need open, sunlit ground layer vegetation, which in the south-eastern coastal plain is maintained by frequent low-intensity fire. Where fire is suppressed the canopy closes, the forage disappears and the colony fades out.