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Rival packs of strays dogs looking for scraps around The Chernobyl fallout zone may be evolving faster than other animals to survive in one of the most hostile environments on Earth.
Scientists analyze the impact of the world’s worst nuclear disaster 36 years ago on the semi-feral dogs that roam the decaying, abandoned buildings of the power plant and the surrounding radioactive Red Forest.
Miraculously, wild dogs can still reproduce and endure extreme winters while relying on the remains of tourists who are warned not to touch them.
Researchers say humans can learn from the resilience of 500 stray dogs whose numbers have increased in the 36 years since the cataclysmic disaster and Soviet concealment.
On April 26, 1986, an explosion and fire at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine caused radioactive fallout to be released into the atmosphere. 30 workers died, while the number of long-term deaths from radiation poisoning is estimated to be in the thousands.
The packs are believed to be descendants of dogs left behind by families during the chaotic evacuation. They are thought to have survived attempts by Soviet soldiers to shoot the animals to prevent the spread radiation.
“Somehow two small populations of dogs managed to survive in that highly toxic environment,” the lead researcher Dr. Norman Kleiman he said.
Blood samples were collected from semi-feral dogs caught around the power plant and another pack working in the nearby city of Chernobyl.
Despite sharing a make-up with German Shepherds and being separated by only ten miles, free-breeding dog populations have been found to reproduce independently of each other.
By analyzing the dogs’ DNA, the team identified 391 end regions in their genomes that differed between the two groups, some pointing to genetic repair after Chernobyl-like exposures.
Scientists say more work needs to be done to assess how decades of radiation exposure might have changed the animals’ genomes — and perhaps even accelerated evolution.
They hope that future studies will reveal the genetic effects of radiation exposure and observe the adverse health effects of other nuclear or environmental disasters on animals and humans.
According to Dr. Matthew Breen of NC State: “The overarching question here is: Does an environmental disaster of this magnitude have a genetic impact on life in the region?
“By teasing out whether or not the genetic changes we found in these dogs are a response of the dog genome to the exposures the populations faced, we may be able to understand how dogs survived in such a hostile environment and what this might mean for any populations – animals or humans – experiencing similar exposure.”
Swedish authorities were the first to discover radioactive fallout in Europe, forcing Soviet officials, who had tried to cover up the disaster, to open up about it days later.
State Veterinary Agency in 2017 The Czech Republic said about half of all wild boars in the southwest of the country they were radioactive and considered unsafe for consumption. Boars feed on an underground fungus that absorbs radioactivity from the soil. Similar problems with radioactive wildlife have been reported in Austria and Germany.
The full study on Chernobyl dogs is published in the journal Canine medicine and genetics.