Scientists hope that studying these dogs can teach humans new tricks about how to live in the harshest, most degraded environments, too.
This photo taken by Timothy Mousseau shows dogs in the Chernobyl area of Ukraine on Oct. 3, 2022. More than 35 years after the world's worst nuclear accident, the dogs of Chernobyl roam among decaying, abandoned buildings in and around the closed plant somehow still able to find food, breed and survive.
, focusing on 302 free-roaming dogs living in an officially designated “exclusion zone” around the disaster site. They identified populations whose differing levels of radiation exposure may have made them genetically distinct from one another and other dogs worldwide. caused radioactive fallout to spew into the atmosphere. Thirty workers were killed in the immediate aftermath while the long-term death toll from radiation poisoning is estimated to eventually number in the thousands.
At first, Ostrander said, they thought the dogs might have intermingled so much over time that they’d be much the same. But through DNA, they could readily identify dogs living in areas of high, low and medium levels of radiation exposure. Dr. Kari Ekenstedt, a veterinarian who teaches at Purdue University and was not involved in the study, said it's a first step toward answering important questions about how constant exposure to higher levels of radiation affects large mammals. For example, she said, “Is it going to be changing their genomes at a rapid rate?”
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