In the immediate aftermath, plants and wildlife were clearly devastated. Within months, up to 4. For a few years after the accident, cows and sheep that had been evacuated were noticeably sickened, as were their offspring. Beasley, who works at the Savannah River Ecology Lab and has studied the environmental impact of the Savannah River Site , a former nuclear weapons factory, wondered how larger animals had been affected. These reports surprised him, he says. Beasley began looking at statistics from the Belarus Ministry of Natural Resources.
For the first decade after the disaster — from — researchers flew over the zone via helicopter to count large animals. They saw numbers of elk, roe deer, red deer, and wild boar actually increasing.
They found population densities of animals like elk, roe deer, red deer and wild boar were similar to those counted in four uncontaminated natural reserves in Belarus. Meanwhile, wolves were 7 times more abundant in the exclusion zone than in control reserves in Belarus, and 19 times more abundant than in an uncontaminated reserve in Russia.
Intrigued, Beasley decided to go to Chernobyl to investigate. Using motion-triggered cameras, scientists have documented a growing ecosystem in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Over a five-week period, Beasley and colleagues set up 98 camera traps in the Belorussian side.
At each site, they cleared vegetation from the ground, set down a small plaster tab infused with a scent to attract carnivores and omnivores, and placed a motion-sensor-activated infrared camera nearby. To protect themselves, the researchers wear dosimeters to keep track of their dosage, minimize the time spent in high-radiation areas, and wear full-face respirators when they must disturb the soil. When the team looked at the footage, they detected 14 species, including the moose, wolves, foxes, deer and the endangered Eurasian bison which was introduced in the s as a conservation effort.
The researchers plugged numbers and locations on the four most plentiful species gray wolf, raccoon dog, red fox and Eurasian boar into a statistical model which factored in type of habitat, distance to water, and distance to the edge of the zone a way of measuring human presence.
People who dodge these checkpoints to trespass in the Exclusion Zone are known as "stalkers". Guards report them to the police. When Turnbull, who lives in Ukraine's capital Kyiv, started making regular visits to the zone, he met Bogdan, and other checkpoint guards. They were reluctant to talk at first so he had to win them over. Then he offered them to chance to take part in his research, which he says was a "turning point".
His idea was to give the guards disposable cameras and ask them to take pictures of the dogs — not posed portraits but scenes of everyday life. The guards only had one other request - "please, please — bring food for the dogs". So Turnbull did. The photos taken by the guards revealed how much they had developed companionships with the wandering dogs of the Exclusion Zone.
Turnbull published some of the resulting images and material from interviews with the guards in a paper in December. More recently, he interviewed one of the study participants again on behalf of BBC Future.
The guard in question has asked not to be identified to avoid disciplinary action at work, so we refer to him here by the pseudonym "Bogdan". When Bogdan walks around the abandoned streets of the zone to check for stalkers, the dogs happily accompany him, he says. They always appear eager to see whether he, or a passing tourist, might be carrying food.
Should a companion dog get distracted or run off to chase an animal, it always eventually returns to Bogdan, he adds. The loyalty goes both ways. Turnbull says the guards sometimes go to the trouble of helping the dogs by pulling out ticks embedded in their skin, or by giving them rabies injections. Monitoring who comes and goes from the Exclusion Zone sometimes makes for a dull occupation.
But there are always dogs nearby. At some checkpoints, the guards have more or less adopted some of the animals. They feed them and give them shelter. But not all are so tame.
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. She discovered the wolf pack near the village using unorthodox, but cheap, methods. In a new study released Monday , Beasley says that the population of large mammals on the Belarus side has increased since the disaster.
He was shocked by the number of animals he saw there in a five-week survey. Camera traps captured images of a bison, 21 boars, nine badgers, 26 gray wolves, 60 raccoon dogs an Asian species also called a tanuki , and 10 red foxes. See a video about wolves taking back Chernobyl. 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. 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. Eventually, as the beavers fell trees, the land will return to bogs. The radiation in the exclusion zone is roughly 1, times lower than at the time of the accident, and there are now two hostels, a bar, a couple of restaurants and a cash machine. The contamination maps on the wall behind me show that some hotspots of radiation persist.
Around 8 p. Wearing chest waders and head lamps, we enter the ponds to gather frogs until 1 or 2 a. Frogs in the exclusion zone are darker than those outside it, thanks to higher levels of melanin, which might be an adaptation that protects them from ionizing radiation.
We analyse how much radiation their bodies contain, and tend to find damage to some, often to the liver. Once expected to become a wasteland, the Chernobyl area is now a nature reserve. The first 31 horses were released here in , 12 years after the disaster, and it is one of the few places where they continue to live freely.
0コメント