Hello I hope you are fine!

Today i came across an interesting article and i wanna share it with you. As the title suggest it is about the increment in wolves in the area of Chernobyl. We all have heard a bit about Chernobyl but i will write a few things in order to have a bigger and better picture of what happened there.

Chernobyl 

The Chernobyl disaster happened on 25-26 April of 1986 in the No 4 light water graphite moderated reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant which was near the town of Pripyat. Nowadays it is considered as Ukrainian soil but back then it was part of Soviet Union. (wikipedia)

The whole incident started in order to test if the turbines could generate enough energy in case they had loss of power and that test wasn't a new one, they have done it again. They started the test by turning down the reactor but when it reached 1% of it's capacity they tried to bring it back by increasing the power but then it got out of hand. The hot fuel merging with the cool water creating a reaction generating a steam explosion and then when air got into a graphite fire emerged too. That particular fire burned for 10 days releasing way too much radiation in the air. The whole problem occurred because the reactor had design flaws that's why it got out of hand as well as the operator didn't followed the procedure as it should have been because he was ordered to continue.

28 people directly involved died within 4 months as a result of radiation and burns and about 7000 kids below 18 obtained thyroid cancer. Others say that the number was up to 50 as a result of radiation and 30+ as a result of the explosion. About 300.000 evacuated their houses and resettled. In general it affected everything, the people, the fauna and fauna, the water nobody ''escaped' for example some animals instantly died or couldn't reproduce or they produced mutants. The good thing was that not everything was affected the same. As a result the government issued that there will be an Exclusion zone under military control in which the radiation is in extremely high levels and people must be away.

Wolf Population & Wildlife

This brings us to today and to the main purpose of the post. In that exclusion zone still people can't go except in some areas nearby that are open for tourism ( i will talk about this in another post probably). Although as everything in that particular area paid and pays the cost of the Chernobyl disaster, wolves among other animals increased in numbers. 

The fact that nobody interfered with the wildlife all this time made that increment possible. Literally all the animals there live all these years alone without humanity threatens their food and shelter. More specifically as a result of this the wolf population is seven times more than in the surrounding areas.

Scientists thought that probably some of those wolves as the numbers are always getting up will abandon that area and move forward to other ones. It's natural with so many wolves around someone to just try and find a new route to discover. As a matter of fact they found a young wolf who went far from the exclusion zone. With a tracker they measured that the young wolf moved 300km from the exclusion zone but due to a malfunction they couldn't actually know if it came back to it's home or moved further away.

Conclusion and Concerns 

The obvious conclusion scientists made is that this whole situation helped the wildlife to grow more and that other animals may have moved beyond the exclusion zone. Also a concern of scientists and that's if i may add is a real one was whether the animals that leave the exclusion zone will bring mutations alongside and what those mutations would mean for us? That's indeed very interesting as we have no idea if those mutations will bring harm,good or have no effect. 

For example let's say a chicken, sheep or something comes out of the exclusion zone and mate with another animal, will the child be a mutant or not? will the appearance be different or not? If we eat it, will it be bad for our health, will it gonna affect us when we bare our children or nothing at all? According to the same scientists they still haven't any evidence regarding that matter!

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Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
https://www.livescience.com/62964-chernobyl-wolves-spreading.html
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10344-018-1201-2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone
http://www.radioactivity.eu.com/site/pages/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone.htm