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Science


THERE’S SOMETHING ODD ABOUT THE DOGS LIVING AT CHERNOBYL

Pets left behind when people fled the disaster in 1986 seem to have seeded a
unique population.

By Katherine J. Wu

Didier Ruef / VISUM / Redux
March 3, 2023
Share

In the spring of 1986, in their rush to flee the radioactive plume and booming
fire that burned after the Chernobyl power plant exploded, many people left
behind their dogs. Most of those former pets died as radiation ripped through
the region and emergency workers culled the animals they feared would ferry
toxic atoms about. Some, though, survived. Those dogs trekked into the camps of
liquidators to beg for scraps; they nosed into empty buildings and found safe
places to sleep. In the 1,600-square-mile exclusion zone around the power plant,
they encountered each other, and began to reproduce. “Dogs were there
immediately after the disaster,” says Gabriella Spatola, a geneticist at the
National Institutes of Health and the University of South Carolina. And they
have been there ever since.





Spatola and her colleagues are now puzzling through the genomes of those
survivors’ modern descendants. In identifying the genetic scars that today’s
animals may have inherited, the researchers hope to understand how, and how
well, Chernobyl’s canine populations have thrived. The findings could both
reveal the lasting tolls of radiation and hint at traits that have helped
certain dogs avoid the disaster’s worst health effects. The fates of dogs—bred
and adapted to work, play, and lounge at our side—are tied to ours. And the
canines we leave behind when crises strike could show us what it takes to
survive the fallout of our gravest mistakes.

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