Wildlife Returning To Chernobyl 337
The wilderness is encroaching over abandoned towns in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. One of the elderly residents who refused to evacuate the contaminated area says packs of wolves have eaten two of her dogs, and wild boar trample through her cornfield. Scientist are divided as to whether or not the animals are flourishing in the highly radioactive environment: "Robert J. Baker of Texas Tech University says the mice and other rodents he has studied at Chernobyl since the early 1990s have shown remarkable tolerance for elevated radiation levels. But Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina, a biologist who studies barn swallows at Chernobyl, says that while wild animals have settled in the area, they have struggled to build new populations."
Wild animals? (Score:5, Funny)
It's hard to attract females when you have 2 beaks, 3 hooves and only 1 eye.
Re:Wild animals? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wild animals? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Wild animals? (Score:4, Funny)
OMG! The idea of a swimsuit calendar "The Women of Slashdot" has just created a singularity of desire and confusion in my mind!
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Irregular heartbeat and small tits optional.
Re:Wild animals? (Score:5, Funny)
Oblig. Eddie Izzard (Score:3, Funny)
-Dressed to Kill
Re:Wild animals? (Score:4, Funny)
Tsukiko, is that you????
Shorter Generations (Score:5, Informative)
For those who have yearly reproduction cycles, we are looking at 21 years, twenty generations for evolution to take place. Those with shorter cycles, such as mice and rats, etc. They probably have evolved enough protection through 50 or more generations that life for them is not so much of an issue.
Creatures with longer cycles, such as humans, would probably have a hard time adapting via evolution. The positive note hear is the relative short half life, but it is still a problem for future generations.
There is a study that indicates that low levels of radiation can have positive effects on health [sciencedaily.com]. Not that I would recommend moving to Chernobyl any time soon.
Re:Shorter Generations (Score:4, Insightful)
If a pair of animals can give birth to twenty young and two make it to breeding age to do the same, the population is holding steady with that 1 in 10 survival rate. For humans in the first world, that would be seen as atrocious.
Ob (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Ob (Score:4, Funny)
Case in point (Score:5, Funny)
pointless blackadder quote (Score:2, Funny)
Blackadder: "Could it have been...two horses perhaps?"
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--
Beats me how you ever even know about Fluffy! - Hagrid
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Isn't this really, really old? (Score:4, Insightful)
The news is old... (Score:4, Insightful)
Dupe! (Score:2)
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Re:Isn't this really, really old? (Score:5, Funny)
Not only old... (Score:3, Interesting)
Scientist are divided as to whether or not the animals are flourishing in the highly radioactive environment
It is not highly radio-active, it has elevated levels of radiation. In fact, it might actually have a more healthy amount of radiation than non-contaminated areas, as there appears to be a positive link between health and slightly elevated levels of radiation. See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article68 5386.ece [timesonline.co.uk] and http://www.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller12.html [lewrockwell.com] for instance.
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Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Returning only now? (Score:5, Informative)
And yes, the DNA of most animals in the area is pretty effed up, but surprisingly most of them appear healthy and reproduce normally. Only goes to show how much redundancy and resilience is built into the DNA / replicating mechanisms we use.
Truth is, even with a sufficient number of a-bombs accross the world, we'll have a very hard time wijping all of humanity and wild life. Life's a tough mother f*cker, hard to destroy.
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No: it was full of wildlife for years now.
And yes, the DNA of most animals in the area is pretty effed up, but surprisingly most of them appear healthy and reproduce normally. Only goes to show how much redundancy and resilience is built into the DNA / replicating mechanisms we use.
Truth is, even with a sufficient number of a-bombs accross the world, we'll have a very hard time wijping all of humanity and wild life. Life's a tough mother f*cker, hard to destroy.
I believe the word "adaptation" would describe this well.
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I'll take that bet, sir.
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Re:Returning only now? (Score:4, Funny)
You thought I was going to say something else, didn't you?
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Kinda like weeds?
And yes, this has been known since the early '90's, wildlife actually never totally disappeared and yes, one generation was screwed up with cancers and freaks but the next generations seem to have overcome that.
Re:Returning only now? (Score:5, Funny)
Just like we overcame being children of the baby boomers. Neat.
Reproduction normal? (Score:5, Informative)
The reason for preserving wilderness is to preserve biodiversity which is essential to maintaining a strong ecosystem. This accidental wilderness has many counts against it in that context.
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Re:Reproduction normal? (Score:4, Informative)
This is part of the standard theory as taught in real genetics courses to potential professional Biologists. Just about everyone else who thinks they support evolution has been miss-taught in high school biology or 'evolutionary biology for non scientists' type classes. Nothing personal, but it sounds like you got one of those sloppy pop courses.
Re:Reproduction normal? (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, if the animals live to leave offspring, it's not superficial appearance of normalcy, it's normalcy, never mind all the curruption going under.
The purpose of an animal, is, after all, precisely this.
As about 1/3 of offspring being malformed, this is far from bad for the wildlife. If 1/2 was, they'd do fine, hell, if 3/4 were, they'd do fine. Even if none of them had mutation, most of the animal offspring would die in infancy for plenty of other reasons (like natural predators).
Re:Reproduction normal? (Score:4, Insightful)
The article says radiation levels are 10 to 100 times normal background. This range is probably beneficial for humans and most other animals. Living there probably isn't bad from the standpoint of background radiation; but I wouldn't want to eat food grown there or live in a house without a dust filter.
Things are getting better there faster than predicted, and if careful study is done we'll have more data for the theory of hormesis with respect to radiation.
Re:We could wipe out life. (Score:4, Funny)
I think, however, that this epic tragedy will be offset from all the people who'll gain superpowers as a result.
Re:Returning only now? (Score:4, Insightful)
We can build something as extraordinarily powerful as a nuclear weapon because there is a lot of energy to be released from the fission of uranium or plutonium or whatever. This energy is stored in the bonds inside the unstable nuclei, and we just let it out. It was originally put in there when some exploding star made the uranium nuclei in question, long before the solar system was formed. We do not have to provide that energy.
Thing is, there are not similar reserves of naturally-occurring antimatter to be mined, because... well, it's kind of obvious. The problem is this: current (and any sensible-sounding future) methods of antimatter production involve actually putting in at least the amount of energy you want to get out. That mass won't come out of nowhere you know. So while it's all fine to say that an antimatter weapon would be scary because a really really small one could knock the planet off course, I have to ask you where you you think we're gonna get that much energy from. Maybe from a nuclear power plant? The amount of uranium used is going to be the amount you'd need to make a normal nuke big enough to do the same job, isn't it (that is to say, more than could conceivably be acquired)?
Also, what makes you think that the threat of total annihilation would bring peace? The threat of total annihilation is here already. Russia and the USA maintain far more weapons than they need to completely destroy the other, partly as protection against missiles being hit while still on the ground, etc. If all the world's weapons were to be detonated, it would likely destroy human life on the planet. If such a thing as a world-destroying antimatter bomb ever existed, people would do what the Soviet Union and the USA did with their nuclear arsenals: basically agree not to use them, and go on fighting with conventional weapons (yes, I know they didn't officially fight each other at any point, but USSR armed the Vietcong, US armed the Mujahideen, etc.).
Same as in Bikini (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Same as in Bikini (Score:5, Insightful)
Bombing and radiation is better for wildlife than sub divisions.
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Re:Same as in Bikini (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Same as in Bikini (Score:4, Funny)
Are you volunteering to get off?
Re:Same as in Bikini (Score:5, Insightful)
I bred at less than my replacement level. If everyone in the word were to follow that tendency, we would be able to half the population by roughly 2050 and half it again in the 20 years after that so by 2100 the population would be roughly 1.5 billion. The chinese made some of these extremely hard choices with regard to overbreeding and overpopulation and have benefited from doing so.
The problem is that ignorant poor people and some religious people are going to breed us to the point where things are unpleasant all the time at the best or downright ugly and murderous at the worst.
Overbreeding would be no problem if the overbreeders and their descendants were limited to a fixed plot of land. That way the descendants of people with sustainable breeding habits could live in a paradise while the overbreeders lived in hell on earth, died of starvation, and killed each other over precious water and living space.
But no-- their descendants would feel they had a right to spread equally into everyone else's land. Thus spreading the consequences of their poor breeding choices.
You can buy all the CFC's you want, conserve til you bleed, eat only grains (because meat is so inefficient) and eventually that will all be pointless unless a lot of humans die fast from something. Too many humans is the fundamental problem-- not global warming, not limited oil, not limited food, not limited water.
If we do not address this fundamental problem- then everything else we do is similar to ignoring the huge hungry rampaging elephant in the room while we keep replacing the carpet and drapes.
Re:Same as in Bikini (Score:5, Insightful)
I am all for people having only enough children that they can raise. I am all for adoption as well if you want a very large family. But this "I only had a replacement" thing is just posturing.
Re:Same as in Bikini (Score:5, Insightful)
But they won't, and so all you accomplished is selecting yourself out of the gene pool.
We have a ton of resources on the planet. Supporting more humans with the resources that we have is a reasonably easy problem technologically. Yes, we have a high population compared to what a species without agriculture (and modern agriculture) could do, but we have those things. The earth could handle a bunch more population, but the trends indicate that human population growth is slowing quickly enough that it won't be a real issue.
The appropriate tactic here isn't to have less kids, it's to have as many kids as you think you can reasonably educate. The only way we'll be able to keep quality of life up as a species is to have as high a percentage of well educated people as possible - that way there will be people around to suggest and implement rational solutions to problems.
Re:Same as in Bikini (Score:4, Insightful)
I find this particularly neat in that the easiest deterent of overpopulation is perhaps technological proliferation.
Nature can adapt to sub divsions as well (Score:3, Interesting)
Our Delaware River that been an industrial wasteland is starting to see some interesting fish migrations again.
Eliminating the poisons and raw sewage of our industrial past is clearly part of the solution, but there is more suburban sprawl here than ever and nature seems to adapt just fine.
When subdivisions have been around as long as rain fore
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Re:Same as in Bikini (Score:5, Informative)
Mice and rodents generally have a lifespan measured in months, not years. A deer that makes it to adulthood has a maximum natural lifespan of around 15, if they make it to five they're doing good*. Large predators might live for a decade in the wild.
Most of the time, the continued existance of their races are predicated on the females having large numbers of young.
From my chernobyl research(done more than a decade ago), there has ALWAYS been a presense of plants and animals there. You have to remember, it was an actual small city, so in many cases large animal life was restricted to those that humans approved of. It takes time for concrete to crack and allow large trees such as are seen in the pictures to grow.
Then we have Baker and Mousseau argueing. I'll note that it appears that Baker appeared to concentrate on mammals(specifically rodents) while Mousseau concentrated on birds. Could it simply be that birds are more affected by radiation? That they have a tendency to wander more into the highest contamination areas? The very article notes that they've been found nesting in the sarcophagus.
While the article notes that a third of the nestlings showed abnormalities - I'd have to ask what the normal rate is. I'm aware that even normal barn swallow nestlings don't exactly have the highest survival rate.
To answer the questions, I think that the best solution would be one of radio tagging. We know average survival rates and such for outside the zone. Tag some animals, such as birds and deer, then track their survival and migration habits.
I think that we'd find that even if it's suboptimal, it's still a better area than many places activly occupied by humans.
*Does tend to live longer than bucks, as the bucks take more chances.
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better for wildlife, because radiation keeps all those pesky polluting humans away ?
There's pretty good evidence to suggest that wild animals are actually doing quite well BECAUSE of pesky polluting humans. Seagulls, raccoons, deer, bears, etc. (note: scavengers, herbivore & omnivore) are living off of our agriculture & food waste, and their populations are growing. Take a ride through Michigan, and you'll see dozens of dead deer and/or raccoons on the side of the road. This is getting to be a more common site. Not good for the individual animals, but pretty good evidence of incre
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimini [wikipedia.org]
Bikini is an atoll in the Marshall Islands, where the US tested nuclear devices.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll [wikipedia.org]
Movies (Score:4, Funny)
In a few years we'll be herded into wooden pens by mounted apes and then experimented on.
Oh the folly of it all!!!
No mention of insects and arthropods (Score:4, Insightful)
Insect (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Insect (Score:5, Funny)
The F-bomb?
Photos (Score:5, Funny)
Damn. Radiation in real life is BORING.
Lesser of the two evils (Score:5, Interesting)
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Why is this in HARDWARE? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nuclear power plants are hardware. Big, dangerous, fancy hardware.
Animals are no stranger to radiation (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder, has the antioxidant level in the plant life been measured? How much research is there in regards to long-term, lower-dose radiation exposure not just to individual organisms, but to ecosystems. Ecosystems are like massive organisms themselves.
I would think that selective pressures are probably biting at the bit to get working on increasing tolerance in populations inhabiting these no-man-lands.
Short Lifespan (Score:2)
For anyone interested... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:For anyone interested... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:For anyone interested... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:For anyone interested... (Score:4, Informative)
Sooo... for once read something for its pictures, not its articles.
Biological Magnification? (Score:2, Insightful)
Hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I can't find this and it sounds interesting. Any chance you could provide a link?
Thanks
Rich
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Hunting at Chernobyl (Score:2, Interesting)
Darwin in Action (Score:4, Interesting)
2 cents,
QueenB.
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hmmm, are you sure you're not contradicting yourself? you're saying that are apes that migrated out of the forest, and the go on to say,
The looser is always the one that migrates.
which is a hypothesis that really doesn't have much validity. change, ie. evolution, almost never happens at the center of a population. at least not the kind of cha
Anyway, they will adapt soon (Score:4, Funny)
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There are already bacteria living in active zones of nuclear reactors. ... ECC in their DNA in addition to RAID1 that we currently have.
Those bacteria have quadruple-strand DNA. [wikipedia.org] and an extra error-correction loop.
Both are probably true (Score:5, Informative)
I mean it should be a lot like inbreeding. Sure inbreeding increases the number of seriously fucked up members of the population significantly so you wouldn't want to do it with humans but it can also be used to help establish certain useful traits fairly quickly. The animals living in the Chernobyl area might have more deformed babies, and no doubt if they had to fairly compete with non-irradiated members of their kind they would be at a disadvantage, but the long term effect might just be to increase the rate at which they evolve.
Of course you can't really decide this with a thought experiment but it is annoying that the article suggests increased deformity and cancer rates in individual animals is incompatible with overall health of the species/group.
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Screw the affects on animals (Score:3, Interesting)
Call me selfish or humanocentric, but I'd be very interested in a study on this person! That would be incredibly interesting. It's amazing to me that a person has subsisted in this area for all this time.
An interesting read. (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.theglobalist.com/photo/Chernobyl/Polid
Yeah, but have the Sword Bushes bloomed yet? (Score:2)
Sorry. Someone had to put in an obscure pencil-and-paper RPG reference into this thread, or this wouldn't be Slashdot.
Also spotted... (Score:2, Funny)
Wildlife in the Zone? (Score:2, Funny)
Evolution in Action (Score:2)
Many contaminated animals will be sterile. Most of the mutated offspring will fail to survive to birth. Most of the rest will die before becoming fertile age. Most of the rest will be sterile. Most of the rest will repeat the process, leaving mutated genetic lines to expire quickly.
But some tiny fraction might survive mutated but fit to the new environment. They will be horrible beasts unable to survive anywhere else.
Until we contaminate the rest of the planet, which t
New Chernobyl cash crop... (Score:2)
Seriously, with the radiation there... it just... might... work!
The return! (Score:2)
Whither the treehuggers (Score:2, Funny)
So that's why... (Score:2)
Interesting site. (Score:2, Informative)
Could we have some facts PLEASE!!! (Score:3, Informative)
No, the girl on the motorcycle is a hoax and her supposed ideas about how radioactive the ground is are utterly false.
Please take a look at http://www.chernobyllegacy.com/index.php?cat=1 [chernobyllegacy.com] and other sources before being taken in by the fearmongering.
There were a total of 46 people that died as a result of Cherynobyl. Somewhere in the low thousands have been treated for thyroid problems and some may in fact die from cancer due to exposure to the materials that were in the immediate area from the reactor fire. Nobody else is expected to die with a cause attributed to the reactor fire.
People that have taken measuring instruments into the exclusion zone have reported a slightly elevated background radiation and that is all. It is like the difference between living in Italy vs. Norway where Norway gets more cosmic radiation as compared to Italy.
If Chernobyl was anywhere near as bad as people here seem to think it was, Sweden would be a wasteland as well. It is where a lot of the fallout from the fire settled.
Why surpise? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:This is fantastic (Score:4, Insightful)