https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/5-se...-chernobyl
EXCERPTS: I first visited Chernobyl in 2016, 30 years after the explosion at Reactor Four. I expected silence and scarcity – a lifeless place, defined by radiation. Instead, I found beavers swimming beneath a nuclear power plant.
When the reactor exploded on 26 April 1986, many assumed the surrounding land would be biologically dead for generations. The exclusion zone – the area where radiation is highest and access is still restricted – covers roughly 2,600 km² on the Ukrainian side, about the size of Luxembourg.
When neighbouring areas of Belarus are included, the affected landscape stretches to more than 4,500 km². With that as a starting point, it was hard to imagine a future Chernobyl that was anything other than a wasteland.
In the days and months that followed, the evidence seemed to support that view. The pine forests closest to the plant absorbed such intense radiation that their needles turned an orange-red and died, creating what became known as the Red Forest. Early studies reported small mammals and invertebrates were disappearing in heavily contaminated areas.
And yet, 30 years on, there I was, watching dark heads cut slow arcs through the cooling ponds at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant itself, beneath the vast concrete shell of reactor four. A glance upward reminded me this water had been engineered to keep a nuclear reactor from overheating. Now it held a functioning dam with beavers behaving like beavers.
Chernobyl’s mythology presents the place as being filled with grotesque mutations – two-headed fish and other monstrosities. Instead, a white-tailed eagle and a migrating osprey fished as if this were any other wetland.
Great white egrets worked the shallows in the reactor’s shadow. A grey wolf burst briefly from the reeds, then vanished again – running away, not patrolling some apocalyptic wasteland.
What people expect from Chernobyl is a catastrophe frozen in place: ruins, silence, and a landscape visibly broken.
Now, nearly 40 years on, the exclusion zone has become one of the most unusual ecological experiments on Earth, shaped not just by radiation but by abandonment and time. The usual ecological rules no longer apply, leading Chernobyl to have some truly weird wildlife.
Usually, large animals are the first to disappear after an environmental disaster. They reproduce slowly, require large territories, and are especially vulnerable to human pressure. But in Chernobyl, they’re thriving.
[...] And at first glance, it doesn’t appear that the radiation is bothering them. People often imagine Chernobyl’s wildlife is filled with monsters born of radiation, but scientists working in the zone are keen to reset those expectations.
Clear, dramatic physical deformities in large mammals are rarely documented because animals born with severe abnormalities rarely survive long enough to be observed. Meanwhile, the relatively short lifespans of wild mammals mean long-term effects are difficult to detect in the field.
The absence of monsters does not mean the absence of impact, of course, but it does mean that the impacts are not playing out in the ways popular culture expects. Instead, the decisive factor appears to be the sudden absence of people. Hunting stopped. Roads fell apart. Farming ceased. Human disturbance – often the most consistent pressure on large wildlife – dropped almost overnight.
“This matters,” says evolutionary biologist Germán Orizaola, who has been studying the effects of radiation in Chernobyl since the spring of 2016, “because if you focus on the species that are doing badly, you can blame radiation. But often the environment itself has changed. Ecology and the absence of humans are huge factors here.”
The result is an inversion of expectation: landscapes that still carry radioactive contamination, yet support apex predators and large herbivores at densities rarely tolerated in human-dominated Europe. Chernobyl sounds like a place where nothing big should live. Instead, big animals are among its most visible residents.
[...] If black frogs stretch our idea of adaptation, some of Chernobyl’s fungi push it even further.
Inside the ruined reactor buildings and across parts of the exclusion zone, scientists have found dark, melanin-rich fungi growing where almost nothing else can survive. They coat walls, creep across debris and colonise environments saturated with ionising radiation – even in places that should be profoundly hostile to life.
[....] Whether these fungi are truly ‘using’ radiation as an energy source remains an open question. What is clear is that they exploit an extreme niche that barely existed before 1986. When the reactor melted down, new ecological opportunities emerged for microbes able to tolerate conditions lethal to most life... (MORE - missing details)
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