Mutant Wolves Roam Chernobyl

 I was disappointed that they didn't have laser eyes or tentacles, however. From the New York Post: "Mutant wolves roaming Chernobyl Exclusion Zone have developed cancer-resilient abilities: study." 

    Cara Love, an evolutionary biologist and ecotoxicologist in Shane Campbell-Staton’s lab at Princeton University, has been studying how the mutant wolves have evolved to survive their radioactive environment and presented her findings at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology in Seattle, Washington, last month.

    In 2014, Love and her colleagues went inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and put GPS collars equipped with radiation dosimeters on the wild wolves.

    They also took blood from the animals to understand their responses to the cancer-causing radiation, according to a release published by the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology.

    With the specialized collars, the researchers can get real-time measurements of where the wolves are and how much radiation they are exposed to, Love said.

    They learned that the wolves are exposed to 11.28 millirem of radiation daily for their lifespans — more than six times the legal safety limit for humans.

    The Chernobyl wolves’ immune systems appeared different than normal wolves’ — similar to those of cancer patients going through radiation treatment, the researchers found.

    Love pinpointed specific regions of the wolf genome that seem to be resilient to increased cancer risk, the release states.

Not too surprising. Both foliage and animal life adapted to the high radiation on and around the Bikini Atoll as well.