WHO has been eating all these berries?

To find out, researchers place motion-triggered video cameras in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. They collect DNA from saliva left on berry bushes. All the evidence points to the same culprit: BEARS.

When bears eat berries, they put their mouths over the whole plant stalk, leaving lots of spit behind. And it’d be hard to miss a berry-eating bear on camera. They demolish entire bushes as they go! And it turns out these bears aren’t just berry eaters. They’re also berry spreaders. After they eat the berries, they drop very-berry bear scat in the woods. The seeds in the scat sprout into new berry plants. These bears are growing their own food!

Until now, many people thought birds were mainly responsible for spreading berry seed through Alaska. The little berries growing there seem like just the kind birds love to eat and carry. But the video camera study shows this: Birds pick off just a few berries at a time. Grizzlies gulp down hundreds! The brown bears have a berry feast while waiting for their main food source—salmon—to enter streams. When grizzlies shift to eating fish, black bears move into berry patches. Both kinds of bears disperse fruit seeds by the thousands.

That news changes the way researchers think about bears. Each part of an ecosystem can help another one survive. But it can also act like a falling domino, knocking out other plant and animal species if it fails. If bears disappear from the Alaska forest, they may not be the only ones to go. Berries could vanish too! That disappearance would affect other plants. One professor says the situation reminds her of the dodo bird. That flightless bird went extinct long ago. Dodos were seed spreaders. When they disappeared, the plants they helped spread disappeared too.

You won’t see the bears of Alaska wearing overalls or carrying pitchforks. But the new study reminds us: God put these fuzzy “farmers” right where He wanted them to be.