Gopher

Gopher is a common name for several burrowing rodents in the family Geomyidae, native to North America. These medium-sized mammals have compact bodies, short limbs, and fur-lined external cheek pouches used to carry food. They dig extensive tunnel systems underground, which can disrupt crops, lawns, and infrastructure but also aerate soil and create habitats for other species. Most species feed on roots, tubers, and leafy vegetation and are typically solitary outside of breeding periods.

The Gopher protocol was an early distributed document retrieval system developed at the University of Minnesota and released in 1991. It used a simple, menu-driven interface and a hierarchical directory structure accessed via gopher URLs, commonly starting with gopher:// and using port 70. Data items were categorized by type, such as text and directories. Gopher was widely used in the early Internet era and coexisted with the World Wide Web before the Web’s graphical technologies became dominant. Today, only a limited number of servers remain, but the protocol is of historical interest and influenced later information architectures.

In culture and usage, the term Gopher is also associated with the University of Minnesota’s athletic teams, the Minnesota Golden Gophers, whose official mascot is Goldy Gopher. The name reflects the state’s association with the rodent and the local nickname for residents of Minnesota. The word is sometimes used more generally to refer to someone from Minnesota.