Packs of wolves who have been exposed to radiation in Chornobyl for more than three decades seem to have developed a resistance to cancer, according to one study.
The research has been carried out by Cara Love, an evolutionary biologist and ecotoxicologist at Princeton University in the US.
In 2014 she and her team visited the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ), put in place after a nuclear reactor exploded at the Chornobyl power plant in Ukraine in 1986.
Although humans have been prevented from accessing the 1,000-square-mile area where radiation still presents a cancer risk, animals have been living, and even thriving there.
Ms Love put radio collars on each wolf to track them and "real-time measurements of where [the wolves] are and how much [radiation] they are exposed to".
She found that the animals were exposed to upwards of 11.28 millirem of radiation every day for their entire lives - over six times the legal safety limit for the average human worker.
These wolves developed altered immune systems, which Ms Love compared to what happens when cancer patients undergo radiation.
What she called “most promising” however, is that she was able to identify specific regions of the wolf genome that seem resilient to increased cancer risk.
Experts are hopeful about this finding, because the research may help towards the fight against the disease in humans.
Ms Love presented her findings at the annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology in Seattle, Washington, last month.
She has not been able to re-visit the CEZ because of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
"Our priority is for people and collaborators there to be as safe as possible,” she said.
