Chernobyl has become a household name for what happens when radioactivity goes bad. The worst nuclear power plant accident in history, the Ukrainian city has been abandoned since the 1986 accident, and the city and its surrounding area is still contaminated with hazardous and potentially life-threatening amounts of radiation. However, new studies show that the contaminated environment, completely devoid of human populations, has actually been repopulated with bursts of wildlife. Animals have retaken the 1600 square mile area in bursts, species ranging from wolves, beavers, tanuki, and Przewalski's horses (a rare and endangered subspecies of wild horse). Protected from poaching by on-site security guards and allowed to roam free with little to no human interaction, species numbers are mounting and returning the once human-populated land to its original state. The radiation of the land seems to have little to no effect, and any mutations in animals seems to draw back to the accident itself, and not in the years following. Says biologist Jim Beasley of the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, who has been studying wolves in Chernobyl, “I would argue that for many of those species [the effects of radiation], even if they’re there, probably aren’t enough to suppress populations to the point where they can’t sustain themselves". Interestingly enough, it seems that the main reason for the animal's bouncing back is the removal of humans from the area, and that humans are more detrimental to species' success than radiation from a nuclear meltdown. Hopefully, Chernobyl will continue to show success in growing animal populations in the future despite its ever-present radioactivity.
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