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Sep 16, 2020 · Researchers have found the land surrounding the plant, which has been largely off limits to humans for three decades, has become a haven for wildlife, with lynx, bison, deer and other animals roaming through thick forests.
- Overview
- Signs of Life
- Debate Continues
- Racking Up Radiation
- Poaching and Protecting
Three decades later, it’s not certain how radiation is affecting wildlife—but it’s clear that animals abound.
Chernobyl, UkraineMarina Shkvyria watches for animal tracks as she walks toward an abandoned village in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the area sealed to the public after a nuclear power plant exploded here 30 years ago, on April 26, 1986. Spotting one, she crouches and runs her finger over the toes of a wolf print in the loose sand.
It may seem strange that Chernobyl, an area known for the deadliest nuclear accident in history, could become a refuge for all kinds of animals—from moose, deer, beaver, and owls to more exotic species like brown bear, lynx, and wolves—but that is exactly what Shkvyria and some other scientists think has happened. Without people hunting them or ruining their habitat, the thinking goes, wildlife is thriving despite high radiation levels.
Shkvyria is a wolf expert at the Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, and one of a handful of scientists following the fate of Chernobyl’s wildlife. She discovered the wolf pack near the village using unorthodox, but cheap, methods. “We came down here late last spring and howled, and the young wolf pups howled back from the top of that hill,” she says with a mischievous smile.
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So far, scientists are divided on how well the animals are really doing in the exclusion zone, which straddles Ukraine and Belarus, says biologist Jim Beasley of the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, who has been studying wolves there with grant support from the National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration.
While researching this story, one biologist who studies Chernobyl told me I would not see any roadkill in the exclusion zone—and would be lucky to hear any birds or see any animals.
So when I visited in early April, I made a point of counting every animal I saw. Even in the busy area between the main guard post and the remains of the Chernobyl power plant, signs of wildlife were everywhere.
Walking along sandy firebreaks used as forest highways with Shkvyria and her colleague, vole specialist Olena Burdo, we found the tracks of wolf, moose, deer, badger, and horses. I counted scores of birds: ravens, songbirds, three kinds of birds of prey, and dozens of swans paddling in the radioactive cooling pond.
In a herd of wild Przewalski's horses, a rare and endangered subspecies of wild horse introduced to the preserve, I counted an adult male, two adult females, and two juveniles. They charged toward us across a large shaggy field, their brush-like black manes standing straight up from taupe bodies, and took a long look at us as disused power lines swayed in the distance.
We also saw the handiwork of beavers—everywhere. The growth of their populations in recent years may be one of the most important things to happen in the zone’s ecology. After placing the camera trap on the trunk of a pine, Shkvyria, Burdo, and I walk along a path, eventually entering a village of rotting wooden cottages slowly being swallowed up by scrubby pines, birches, and willows. Here the earth had been torn up by a sounder of foraging boars.
On the opposite end of the village, a perfectly straight Soviet canal still drained the low-lying land. The bright chips of a freshly chewed birch still lay at the base of a tree. Felled birches, some three feet around, lay across the water, up and down the length of the ditch.
The combined territory of the exclusion zones in Ukraine and Belarus caused by the Chernobyl disaster is a little more than 1,600 square miles, making it one of the largest truly wild sanctuaries in Europe.
But what it means for animals to be rebounding in Chernobyl has become the scientific equivalent of a boxing match, with the latest blow delivered Monday when Beasley put forward a study in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
His study catalogued 14 species of mammals, and “found no evidence to suggest that their distributions were suppressed in highly contaminated areas within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.” The abstract ends pointedly. “These data support the results of other recent studies, and contrast with research suggesting that wildlife populations are depleted within the CEZ.”
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Chernobyl Fox Makes a Six-Layer Sandwich
April 30, 2015 - In Ukraine, a fox in the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant stacks up bread and meat thrown to it by a group of journalists. Click here to read more: " A viral video of a red fox got us wondering: Just how much can they eat? " Video courtesy Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
This year will mark the half-life of cesium-137, one of the most widespread and dangerous of the radionuclides released. That means the amount of cesium has dropped by about half in the 30 years since the accident, decaying into the short-lived barium-137m.
For animals, radioactive material enters the system through the food chain.
As Shkvyria places a camera trap on a pine tree near the wolf hillock, Burdo explains. “Mushrooms concentrate radiation. Voles love mushrooms. When they eat contaminated mushrooms, they concentrate the radiation in their bodies. When wolves eat voles, they pick up the contamination.”
But the level of radionuclide contamination in an animal depends both on concentrations in its habitat and on the diet and behaviors of the animal, she says. Radiation deposited by fallout from Chernobyl has been measured as far away as Norway in reindeer, but it is patchily spread in the exclusion zone.
Wolves, in particular, may get at least some protection from radiation because they have a big territory and move around a lot, even outside the zone into cleaner areas.
“I would argue that for many of those species [the effects of radiation], even if they’re there, probably aren’t enough to suppress populations to the point where they can’t sustain themselves,” says Beasley. In the zone, “humans have been removed from the system and this greatly overshadows any of those potential radiation effects.”
In his research lab in Slavutych, the surreal little Soviet town built right after the disaster for the physicists, workers, and scientists affiliated with Chernobyl, Sergey Gaschak emphatically agrees. The wildlife population has grown “dramatically,” says Gaschak, who has worked in the zone for the past 30 years. (Read about people in the Chernobyl exclusion zone in "The Nuclear Tourist.")
“Before the accident it was an area absolutely populated by people.” But he says that there is a “myth” that new animals have started to appear in the exclusion zone. “This is absolutely not true. Almost all the species we have now, we had before the accident, just in lower densities.”
Gaschak has been using camera traps for a few years now and has a more complete list than almost any other researcher on the Ukrainian side. “We have all large mammals: red deer, roe deer, wild boar, moose, horse, bison, brown bear, lynx, wolves, two species of hare, beaver, otter, badger, some martins, some mink, and polecats,” he says, without taking a breath, adding that there are may be 20 other mammals including bats and also ten or more species of big birds, including hawks, eagles, owls, storks, and swans.
Backing up the camera traps, Shkvyria has gone into the old Soviet archives, stacks of paper reports shelved in the National Academy of Sciences. What she found agrees with Gaschak’s research, and tempers international excitement over a population boom in the zone.
“We looked through official state censuses of all hunted species, and it was interesting for us to not see a really big difference between the 1960s, 1980s, 1990s, and today. It was a stable structure—40, 50, 60 wolves, not more” on the Ukrainian side, she says. “Illegal hunting still influences it, so it’s a dynamic system, but it’s more or less stable.”
Indeed, the people living on the edge of the zone, even the poachers, are a good barometer to anecdotally measure increases in the number of wildlife, since animals do not need a pass to enter or leave the zone, as one villager put it.
May 8, 2019 · But today, 33 years after the accident, the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which covers an area now in Ukraine and Belarus, is inhabited by brown bears, bisons, wolves, lynxes, Przewalski horses,...
Apr 4, 2022 · Science. Apr 4, 2022 7:00 AM. Chernobyl Was a Wildlife Haven. Then Russian Troops Arrived. The area around the defunct power plant has been an unexpected rewilding success story. Now attempts...
Feb 7, 2022 · Thirty-five years after the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, reports often portray the area as a paradise for wildlife. Photos show foxes roaming the buildings of abandoned towns and bison and wild horses flourishing after people were permanently evacuated.
Jul 12, 2021 · 12 July 2021. Tracking Chernobyl’s effects on wildlife. Evolutionary ecologist Germán Orizaola Pereda analyses how species have been affected, 35 years after the world’s worst nuclear...
May 11, 2019 · But today, 33 years after the accident, the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which covers an area now in Ukraine and Belarus, is inhabited by brown bears, bison, wolves, lynxes, Przewalski horses, and...
