Mousseau and his collaborators, arguing that it is difficult to show that radiation levels in the exclusion zone, which covers about 1,000 square miles, have had much noticeable effect. Some researchers have challenged the studies by Dr. Studying the effects on animals and insects can lead to a better understanding of the impact on people as well. But lower doses can cause genetic mutations, leading to cancers and other physical problems that may show up over longer periods and affect breeding and longevity. Relatively low doses of radiation, however, even over a long time, may have little or no effect.

They were exposed to lethal doses, in many cases in just a few minutes, and their organs and tissues were so badly damaged that they died within weeks. That is what happened to several dozen technicians and firefighters at the Chernobyl plant when the Unit 4 reactor exploded on April 26, 1986. A high enough dose - many thousands of times higher than the levels in the forest - can cause sickness or death. Ionizing radiation, like that produced by cesium, strontium and other radioactive isotopes, affects living tissue in several ways, among them by breaking strands of DNA. Mousseau said, chronic exposure to radiation appears to be a kind of “unnatural selection” driving evolutionary change. Some bird species, they reported in the journal Functional Ecology, appear to have adapted to the radioactive environment by producing higher levels of protective antioxidants, with correspondingly less genetic damage. Mousseau, his longtime collaborator, Anders Pape Moller of the National Center for Scientific Research in France, and colleagues have reported evidence of radiation’s toll: higher frequencies of tumors and physical abnormalities like deformed beaks among birds compared with those from uncontaminated areas, for example, and a decline in the populations of insects and spiders with increasing radiation intensity.īut their most recent findings, published last month, showed something new. After the nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima, Japan, three years ago he has conducted similar research there, too. The list of creatures he has studied is long: chiffchaffs, blackcaps, barn swallows and other birds insects, including bumblebees, butterflies and cicadas spiders and bats and mice, voles and other small rodents. Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina, has been coming to the contaminated area around Chernobyl, known as the exclusion zone, since 1999.

“It’s a perfect laboratory setting for us.”ĭr.

“This level of chronic exposure is above what most species will tolerate without showing some signs, either in terms of how long they live or in the number of tumors they have, or genetic mutations and cataracts,” Dr.

Svarog detector call of chernobyl