The Animals of Chernobyl | The New York Times

all right well it looks like a nice spiderweb okay let's see if we can't catch this on film we missed it up a little bit you know what was invisible now becomes visible nice yeah that's perfect yeah this this one's sitting in in being bathed in about 45 mic receivers per hour plus or minus which is pretty darn radioactive in 1986 an explosion and fire at the nuclear reactor in what was then the Soviet Union in Chernobyl Ukraine launched a plume of radioactive fallout that rendered a large swath of the region here uninhabitable since then the creation of a thousand square mile exclusion zone prohibiting human activity has led some to declare the area a restored Eden brimming with wildlife but for more than a decade timothy Musso an american scientist has conducted an extensive biological survey here and his studies have shown that life has been far more slow to recover than previously believed it's a perfect area for biological studies because we see a diversity of plants and animals it's one of the hotter areas in the Chernobyl zone and so from our previous work we know that this this level of chronic exposure is above that that most species will tolerate this year we've been looking at the small rodents we've been looking at spiders earlier this year we were here working with the birds we found that the abundance of many species of birds are depressed in these areas of high contamination leading to an overall decrease in the biodiversity on the order of you know 50% fewer species in hot areas and there should be if there had if there wasn't radioactivity in the area mousou says he has seen much higher frequencies of tumors and physical abnormalities like deformed beaks among birds compared with those from uncontaminated areas he is measured decline the populations of insects and spiders and yet in a recent paper released last month mousou has also shown that some birds here may actually be adapting the high radiation life so these are special digital audio recorders that are designed to pick up the high frequency sounds that bats produce while their echo locating and flowing around and trying to capture insects and by the frequency of calls we can get an idea of the abundance of that look at that Oh 43 42 43 stuff yeah this mushroom was definitely much hotter than the surrounding areas the legacy of Chernobyl Musso says can be seen not just in the animal life cut trees here show a dramatic change in the color of their rings exactly in 1986 it occurred to us after visiting Fukushima last year that some of those spider webs looked a little strange and so we thought we would test that hypothesis in a very scientific way by by capturing images of as many spider webs as we can as we can find in hot and cold areas of the same kinds of species to see if there's more variability or you know less less less structure to the webs in these radioactive areas it can serve as a as a biomarker of we're in the town of Chernobyl downtown Chernobyl as it were and what we found is that the frequency of aberrant color patterns on the on the backsides of these bugs is directly proportional to how radioactive the area is the one on this side is relatively normal and then you look on the other one and you see that the black spots are kind of fused together okay Rousseau's work in Chernobyl will continue for years to come he's extended his study to Fukushima Japan and hopes to shed a brighter light on the lasting effects of radiation on biological systems including humans Oh

Channel: The New York Times

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Keywords: Chernobyl Disaster (Event), The New York Times, NY Times, NYT, Times Video, nytimes.com, news, newspaper, feature, reporting, animal, nature, biology, biologist, science, disaster, nuclear, nuclear meltdown, radiation, flora, fauna, chernobyl, ukraine, nuclear power plant, spider, spider web, radioactive, soviet union, explosion, fire, fallout, eden, rodent, bird, species, biodiversity, tumpr, deformed, beak, adaptation, mushroom, tree, tree ring, fukushima, bug, beetle, animals of chernobyl, radioactive animals

Id: TG-nwQBBfmc

Length: 5min 11sec (311 seconds)

Published: Tue May 06 2014