Hello everyone! Today I wanted to write about a paper that came out recently in Ecosphere. The study looked at salmon-bear ecosystems and the effect that bears had on seed dispersal.

It’s long been believed that birds were the best seed dispersers. They eat the berries, seeds included, and when the seed had come through their system, it had a nice little lump of bird poo to help get it started in growing. However, the team behind this paper may have shown that the birds might not be so important for the Devils Club flowers.

To explain this hypothesis better, some background information is needed. In South-East Alaska, where this study took place, there are two species of bear. The black bear and the brown bear. Typically, when these two species compete for a food source the brown bear is more dominant so will win. And when the salmon that…