Did Chernobyl Create Mutant Animals?

less than 60 seconds after engineers working at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant decided to test reactor unit for safety in the event of a power failure a giant steam explosion on April 26 1986 created the largest accidental release of radiation into the environment in history 51 weeks later 350,000 people had been evacuated from 3 different countries the people left but nature remained what happened to it let's get technical [Music] if you wanted to know exactly what would happen to an environment after a nuclear meltdown there really is no better place on earth to study than the silent florists and the crumbling infrastructure immediately surrounding Chernobyl reactor unit four specifically you'd want to look into the area known as the Chernobyl exclusion zone set up as a boundary after the accident which we explained in detail in a previous episode of this program it extends 30 kilometers in every direction from the failed nuclear reactor what happened and what is still happening through the wildlife inside of this exclusion zone is the subject of over 30 years worth of study today we're going to look into all those studies to find out what actually happened did the deer grow 2 heads did the birds start to glow or is all this talk of mutated animals and nuclear wasteland that you might see say on the internet a bit less critical than we may assume yeah yeah the miniseries was great I know when Chernobyl exploded fire and force Carried highly radioactive particles high into the air unstable atoms were literally flung into the sky decaying and depositing ionizing energy as they traveled eventually this cloud of contamination covered over 200,000 square kilometers of land mass 1% of the arable surface area on earth after these radioactive particles settled as a kind of deadly dust they irradiated everything the infrastructure the land the water people's clothes and hair plants animals everything but as you can see that spread and deposition was not uniform it was more like a patchwork of radioactivity that can change in intensity by a few hundred times depending if you were standing in a single spot or just a few hundred meters away obviously the radiation was most intense right next to the reactor with measured levels of up to 20 Gray's per day for context eight Gray's is a hundred percent lethal for humans so if you are standing next to the reactor right after the incident depending on your luck it would be probably the last thing you ever did outside of a hospital bed but then again compared to the rest of life humans are extraordinarily sensitive if you had to guess where humans fell on a chart of radiation sensitivity how much radiation we could take before it was lethal how do you think we would compare to the rest of life here are some lethal radiation levels for some life that you know viruses and bacteria are very radiation resistant remember we were talking about twenty grays earlier and this goes all the way up to 10,000 insects are also fairly resistant as our higher plants birds not so much mammals though are the most sensitive organism that we know of and humans are the most sensitive mammal because of our relatively complex biology radiation affects you and me more than just about any other organism on the planet by analogy it's much easier to mess up the inner workings of a wristwatch than it is to mess up a sundial but again humanity left Pripyat and the area's most affected by Chernobyl's meltdown Nature had to endure the worst of it happened in the first 20 days after the disaster radioactive atoms were settling on the surface of the ground on plants on infrastructure and were being inhaled by unsuspecting wildlife studies of the Chernobyl exclusion zone refer to this period as phase one over the next few months these radionuclides moved into another part of the environment rain was washing them off of the surfaces and into the soil and therefore plants were taking them up into their tissues 80 percent of the total radiation dose given to plants and animals by Chernobyl was during these first two phases the next 12,000 days all the way up until today is phase 3 of the ongoing Chernobyl disaster these short-lived extremely radioactive particles have decayed Way but a long-term chronic exposure continues to irradiated everything inside of the exclusion zone mostly from the caesium contamination so three decades later and nature is still dealing with the fallout from the fallout and in all that time what actually happened to her like almost everything about Chernobyl what happened to the wildlife is controversial however there are a number of real effects we know happen for sure Chernobyl's most infamous environmental effect is probably what you're about to see happen around me during phase one and Phase two of the disaster five square kilometers of forest immediately surrounding the reactor were blasted with dozens of gray's worth of radiation and the first sign that something was killing the trees were the blood-red needles and leaves this area came to be known famously as the red forest and here's an actual photo of it you can see the red dying trees but if you look closely you can also see the swath of perfectly fine green trees right next to the red forest showing you just how directional eyes this invisible Grim Reaper of radiation was and it wasn't just dying trees in the over 9,000 acres surrounding the red force trees stopped producing seeds for up to seven years trees were growing as large pine needles were growing at odd lengths and at odd frequencies there were dead spots on leaves trees were having trouble photosynthesizing however just three years after the accident normal growth was returning to the forest and in 2000 there was actually a study of the trees surrounding the red forest the red forest was itself bulldoze as part of a cleanup effort and it found no red dead Pines this incredible resiliency of life will be a reoccurring theme across Chernobyl exclusion zone studies and it will be somewhat of a controversy after the trees were irradiated they passed it on to the insects and other invertebrates living on and in the soil again thanks to rainfall and intensely contaminated leaves and pine needles softly striking the ground and the effect on this invertebrate population was catastrophic close to the nuclear reactor again during the first two phases of the disaster invertebrate populations were reduced by a factor of 30 perhaps the most striking and well established example of what can happen to the makeup of a wildlife community after a nuclear disaster insect eggs and larvae stopped maturing adults were effectively sterilized by the damage done to their DNA and adults were growing up with weird asymmetries in their body plans bees dragonflies and butterflies had their populations absolutely hammered and all these numbers would not return for a decade but they didn't return then of course there were the birds in the mammals large and small four months after the Chernobyl explosion scientists descended on the exclusion zone to perform autopsies on the wildlife and on the domestic animals and pets that people left behind during this ionizing energy induced Exodus one of the studies to come out of this exclusion excursion was published in 1999 and out of 50 species of identified birds and 45 species of identified mammals it found no unusual appearances and no unusual behaviors this isn't to say that radiation didn't damage these animals it did and it's well documented it's just very important to know that genetic damage from radiation doesn't necessarily produce the kinds of weird mutations that pop culture thinks it does across all the studies were considering today I could not find much beyond weird tree leaves and some discoloration on bird feathers in fact there isn't a single study that documents seriously deformed animals in the Chernobyl exclusion zone Oh two-headed deer no three-eyed Ravens the chernobyl disaster did not produce bizarre radiation twisted monstrosity it either killed organisms outright and reduced their reproductive fitness or simply encouraged them to leave the area that's uncontroversial what science disagrees on though is what is happening in Chernobyl right now if you google the topic of today's program you might find some striking headlines apparently wildlife inside of the Chernobyl exclusion zone is like super chill and doing great according to anecdotal reports tourists and scientific studies populations of wild light inside the exclusion zone are thriving numbers just haven't returned they have significantly increased it's a good story that goes against our expectations of what would happen after a nuclear disaster but is it true well one study published in 2007 summarizing the research that they had at the time entre nobles animals concluded this way the removal of humans alleviates one of the more persistent and ever-growing stresses experienced by natural ecosystems the absence of permanent human residency for 20 years has resulted in a flourishing natural ecosystem around Chernobyl in other words humans put so much stress on an environment through infrastructure building farming pollution and hunting that removing humans from an ecosystem is better for the environment than a nuclear disaster is bad for the environment and we're talking about death clouds of cesium here another study of Chernobyl's animals published in 2015 found that quote these results demonstrate that for the first time regardless of potential radiation effects on individual animals the Chernobyl exclusion zone supports an abundant mammal community after nearly 30 years of chronic radiation exposure go be free unlike a fairy princess however other studies come to much less rosy conclusions in an editorial published in 2011 in the bulletin of the Atomic Scientists it says quote claims for the Chernobyl ecosystems biological health have been largely based on anecdotal evidence with few exceptions wildlife within the zone show a strong pattern of declining abundance another paper from the following year from the same author concludes this way the overwhelming conclusion is that there is no evidence to suggest that animals are doing better inside of the Chernobyl exclusion zone so who do we believe that is hard to say almost all this studies that say animals are doing poorly inside of the exclusion zone come from those same two authors and some of their conclusions since then have come into question on the other hand though many studies have found no seriously deforming effects on wildlife it's true much of what you read on the internet in those headlines could be coming from just Instagram influencers who travel to Pripyat and saw a deer and just thought everything must have been fine it challenged their notions of what a nuclear disaster would act would actually look like what we do know about Chernobyl wildlife is that we don't fully know everything about Chernobyl's wildlife there is no real scientific consensus on the state of animals and plants inside of the exclusion zone we know that there are no giant radioactive beetles terrorizing dead forests but for the full picture more research is needed more data more studies more voices more perspectives sometimes that's just how science goes although that would be pretty read so what actually happened to Chernobyl's wildlife well it's a more complicated question than you may think yes some animals died and mutations did happen but we've never found anything like pop culture might expect like radiation twisted two-headed glowing animals even given the controversy and the fact that we do not know the full state of Chernobyl's ecosystem today I think what we can say is that the disaster did not produce a nuclear wasteland and that nature is far more resilient than perhaps we would have thought interactions like this are incredibly complex but sometimes knowing what you don't know is a great step towards figuring everything out because science [Music] and what about the fish you say there's rumors going around the internet that the fish in the cooling pond near Chernobyl are mutated and huge and monstrous well looking at 30 years worth of studies yes stuff did happen to the fish they had their reproductive fitness really really impacted where they weren't maturing and things were happening with their sperm and it was bad but it didn't produce these giant catfish that could eat a whole person in one gulp that just didn't happen again pop culture's conception of what radiation can do to the phenotype of an organism is way overblown who would have thought thank you so much for watching Alberto if you like this video you will probably like some of our other videos especially the one where we break down step by step exactly what happened during the Chernobyl disaster and if you want to suggest ideas for future episodes or connect with us you can do so on social media at these handles here Thanks [Music]

Channel: Because Science

Views: 1,004,607

Rating: 4.9513068 out of 5

Keywords: Nerdist, Because Science, Kyle Hill, Chernobyl, HBO, Radiation, Ionizing Radiation, Wildlife, Biology

Id: 1Pu934afVrM

Length: 15min 3sec (903 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 08 2019