If you had “cancer-free mutant wolves” on your 2024 bingo card, this story’s for you.
Since the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine was rocked by two devastating explosions in 1986, the local wolves have spent their entire lives exposed to upwards of 11.28 millirem of radiation per day – “six times the legal safety limit of radiation for humans,” according to Fox Business.
Some 35 years later, the mutant wolves roaming the deserted radiation zone seem to have developed a resistance to cancer, a new study has found.
(Video: YouTube)
“Cara Love, an evolutionary biologist and ecotoxicologist at Princeton University, found that the wolves in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) have altered immune systems ‘similar to cancer patients undergoing radiation treatment,’ according to the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology,” Fox Business reports.
In 2014, Love and a team of researchers ventured into the CEZ and fit Chernobyl’s wolves with collars equipped with radiation dosimeters. Urine samples were taken in an attempt to understand the effects of chronic exposure to such toxic levels of radiation.
The collars provided the scientists with “real-time measurements of where [the wolves] are and how much [radiation] they are exposed to,” Love explained.
Data in hand, she was able to identify “specific parts of the animals’ genetic information that seemed resilient to increased cancer risk,” Sky News Australia reports.
Dr. Love hopes that, by identifying the wolve’s protective mutations, humans’ chances of surviving a cancer diagnosis will go up, much in the way researchers have discovered gene mutations in people that indicate an increased risk of developing the deadly disease.
Between the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, Love and her team have been unable to return to the CEZ in recent years.
“Our priority is for people and collaborators there to be as safe as possible,” she said.
According to a 2022 report from Newsweek, the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, which encompasses 1,040 square miles, won’t be inhabitable by humans for at least the next 3,000 years. Some scientists believe that is a wildly optimistic estimate, and 20,000 years is a more realistic timeframe.
“Some areas largely escaped radioactive fallout and are not dangerous to visit or work in, while other areas remain heavily contaminated with a potpourri of radionuclides like cesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-241 and will remain uninhabitable for centuries if not millennia,” Tim Mousseau, Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina, told Newsweek at the time.
With no pesky humans around, animals have reclaimed the land.
That includes packs of wolves, but also packs of man’s best friend, descendants of pets who were abandoned as the 14,000 residents of Chernobyl fled their homes in 1986.
(Video: YouTube)
The dogs — most boxer and Rottweiler mixes — offered Mousseau and his colleagues the first opportunity to study genetic samples that have only occurred one other time in history: in World War II Japan, following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“It was a dream come true for me to be able to do some really sophisticated, advanced genetics in a way that had never been done before in this setting and on a model organism,” Mousseau told ABC News in 2023. “What could be a better model for humans than dogs?”
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Melissa Fine is the former executive editor of Casino Player, Strictly Slots, and Poker
Digest magazines. She is a UCLA graduate, news junkie, and dedicated Stargate SG-
1 fan. Melissa currently lives with her dog and two cats in a tiny town in the Sierra
Nevada foothills.
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