There was a very interesting documentary on PBS a month or two back about the 'Radioactive Wolves' of Chernobyl. Bottom line: they don't seem any more or less healthy than other wolf populations in the region, but do well because nobody hunts them.
I remember seeing a documentary like that on Finnish TV a couple of years back, but it wasn't just about the wolves - it included other animals too. They seem to be doing very well.
Do you happen to remember the name of the documentary? It sounds very interesting.
Perhaps they do well, because the radiation kills off the weak ones relatively quickly (compared to other habitats), and thus the remaining population is actually stronger over time. For humans, that doesn't happen because we try to cure those afflicted which would've otherwise have been "naturally selected out", and so weakens the gene pool over time.
That does not make sense. If the radiation culled the weakest, then it would also affect the stronger individuals. Essentially, radiation would make the stronger weak and make the weak too unhealthy to survive.
More importantly, 'strong' and 'weak' only have meaning relative to a particular evolutionary niche. Adding massive radiation changes the niche so that strong means 'able to survive massive doses of radiation' and 'weak' means 'not'. There is no reason to assume this definition of 'strong' correlates with 'strong' outside a highly irradiated zone.
> "But what we're finding is that there is a significant impact on both the population and the biodiversity - the number of species - in the zone. And it's directly proportional to the level of contamination."
> But this is one side of a polarised scientific debate.
> According to researchers working in the exclusion zone surrounding Chernobyl, there is a "strong signal of decline [of insects] associated with the contamination".
> The team found that bumblebees, butterflies, grasshoppers, dragonflies and spiders were affected.
The background and some terminology of the game ("The Zone", "Stalker") are borrowed from the popular science fiction novella Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and the 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker that was loosely based on it, as well as Stalker, the film's subsequent novelization by the original authors.
There was a very interesting documentary on PBS a month or two back about the 'Radioactive Wolves' of Chernobyl. Bottom line: they don't seem any more or less healthy than other wolf populations in the region, but do well because nobody hunts them.