More than 35 years after the world’s worst nuclear accident, Chernobyl’s dogs roam among dilapidated, abandoned buildings in and around the closed factory – somehow they are still able to find food, reproduce and to survive.
Scientists hope that studying these dogs can also teach humans new tricks on how to live in the harshest, most degraded environments.
They published the first of what they hope will be many genetic studies Friday in the journal Science Advances, focusing on 302 free-ranging dogs living in an officially designated “exclusion zone” around the disaster area. They identified populations whose different levels of radiation exposure may have made them genetically distinct from each other and other dogs around the world.
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“We’ve had this golden opportunity” to lay the groundwork for answering a crucial question: “How do you survive 15 generations in a hostile environment like this?” said National Human Genome Research Institute geneticist Elaine Ostrander, one of the study’s many authors.
Fellow author Tim Mousseau, a professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina, said the dogs are “an incredible tool for looking at the effects of these kinds of environments” on mammals in general.
Chernobyl’s environment is extremely brutal. On April 26, 1986, an explosion and fire at Ukraine’s power plant released radioactive fallout into the atmosphere. Thirty workers were killed in the immediate aftermath, while the long-term death toll from radiation poisoning will eventually run into the thousands.
The survival of wild dogs near the Chernobyl disaster site in Ukraine could give researchers insight into what people might do in similar situations. (Timothy Mousseau via AP)
Researchers say most of the dogs they study appear to be descendants of pets residents had to abandon when they evacuated the area.
Mousseau has been working in the Chernobyl region since the late 1990s and began collecting blood from the dogs around 2017. Some dogs live in the power plant, a dystopian, industrial environment. Others are about 9 miles or 28 miles away.
At first, Ostrander said, they thought the dogs had blended together so much over time that they would be much the same. But through DNA, they could easily identify dogs that lived in areas with high, low, and medium levels of radiation exposure.
“That was a huge milestone for us,” said Ostrander. “And what’s surprising is that we can even identify families” — about 15 different ones.
Now researchers can start looking for changes in the DNA.
“We can compare them and we can say, okay, what’s different, what’s changed, what’s mutated, what’s evolved, what’s helping you, what’s hurting you on a DNA level?” said Ostrander. This includes separating inconsequential DNA changes from targeted ones.
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Scientists said the research could have broad applications, providing insights into how animals and humans may live now and in the future in regions of the world under “ongoing environmental assault” — and in the environment with a lot of radiation in space.
Dr. Kari Ekenstedt, a veterinarian who teaches at Purdue University and was not involved in the study, said it is a first step toward answering important questions about how constant exposure to higher levels of radiation affects large mammals. For example, she said, “Will it change their genomes at a rapid rate?”
Researchers have already started the follow-up study, which means there will be more time with the dogs at the site, about 60 miles from Kiev. Mousseau said he and his colleagues were last there last October and saw no war-related activity. Mousseau said the team has grown close to some dogs, naming one Prancer because she jumps around excitedly when she sees people.
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“Even though they are wild, they still really enjoy human interaction,” he said, “especially when food is involved.”
