“Bears are essentially like farmers.” So says Taal Levi, an Oregon State assistant professor. If you’ve ever wondered what bears do besides forage, fish, and sometimes hibernate, now you know: They also disperse seeds.
A study by Oregon State University researchers concluded that bears—not birds, as was commonly thought—are the primary distributers of small fruit seeds in southeast Alaska. How do they do it? Well… they “poo” it. Bears eat the fruit and spread seeds through their excrement.
The impact from bear scat is significant. “By planting seeds everywhere,” says Levi, “they promote a vegetation community that feeds them.”
Seed distribution is key to a functioning ecosystem. Levi says the Oregon study is the first instance found of a temperate climate plant being primarily dispersed by mammals through their gut. Why is this important? It means big repercussions for plant life if bears are removed or reduced in the region.
Brown bears and grizzlies flourish in Tongass, America’s largest national forest. They gorge on salmon during spawning season. But as they wait for the main course, God provides berries as a bountiful appetizer.
Levi and an assistant set up motion-triggered cameras to record what was eating the berries. In addition to the video footage, they collected bear DNA from saliva left on the plants. The crew recorded birds picking off a few berries, but bears gulped them by the hundreds. The team also found that when brown bears shift to eating fish, black bears move into the berry patches.
Then, in staggered timing, both types of bears disperse thousands of fruit seeds through their scat. That’s not all, though. Rodents that find the bear poop will further carry the seeds, burying them in caches in the soil. If the rodents don’t return to eat the seeds, germination will likely happen, and new fruit plants will grow there as well.
It’s an intricate system, designed by a knowledgeable God who uses seasons, seeds, fish, fruit, and a variety of critters to keep it going. If the system is disrupted, the entire process could suffer.
Ecologist Laura Gough refers to the extinct dodo bird. That bird once spread the seeds of certain plants. But when the bird disappeared, those plant species also became extinct. The link between animals and consumable plants is critical, she says, for maintaining both.
Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the Earth in a measure and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance. — Isaiah 40:12
