![]() ![]() Clean Futures Fund+ĭuring Mousseau’s visits, his team collected blood samples from these dogs for DNA analysis, which let the researchers map out the dogs’ complex family structures. Some Chernobyl dogs live outside of a structure built to contain radioactivity from the 1986 explosion of a reactor at the site. Hundreds more roam farther out in the exclusion zone, an area about the size of Yosemite National Park. ![]() Some 250 strays were living in and around the power plant, among spent fuel-processing facilities and in the shadow of the ruined reactor. Contamination from the plant’s radioactive cloud largely settled nearby, in a region now called the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.ĭogs have lived in the area since the disaster, fed by Chernobyl cleanup workers and tourists. ![]() In 1986, an explosion at one of the power plant’s reactors kicked off a disaster that lofted vast amounts of radioactive isotopes into the air. Not much is known about how local dogs survived after the nuclear accident. He first encountered Chernobyl’s semi-feral dogs in 2017, on a trip with the Clean Futures Fund+, an organization that provides veterinary care to the animals. “I lost track after we hit about 50 visits.” Since his first trip in 1999, Mousseau has stopped counting how many times he’s been to Chernobyl. “We have high hopes that what we learn from these dogs … will be of use for understanding human exposures in the future,” he says. That could have implications for other nuclear disasters and even human space travel, says Timothy Mousseau, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. ![]()
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