Animals near Fukushima are doing surprisingly well despite radiation from nuclear accident
https://www.salon.com/2021/10/19/fukushima-animals-radiation/
While more than 150,000 people were evacuated from an area of roughly 444 square miles, a wide variety of flora and fauna remained behind. They continued to live in that area for multiple generations, offering scientists a fantastic opportunity to study the effects of lifelong radiation exposure.
And what they learned was quite surprising.
Scientists studied biomarkers of DNA damage and stress in populations of wild boar and rat snakes that lived in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone. Those biomarkers were chosen because they were the most telling signs of radiation's consequences on animals.
Interestingly, researchers failed to find any significant adverse health effects, even though they collected their samples between 2016 and 2018 — only five to seven years after the nuclear accident. These findings are especially significant in the case of the boars, because pigs are anatomically similar to humans. That suggests that humans may not need to be as fearful as they currently are about moving back into exclusion areas.
The study also has some interesting implications about what causes stress in animal populations. Because the boar and snakes receive large doses of radiation through the soil — one because of rooting, the other due to slithering — scientists looked at whether the telomeres or "caps" at the ends of their chromosomes had shortened; or, whether board had elevated levels of the stress-correlated hormone cortisol. Neither the boar nor the snakes showed signs that their telomeres had shortened because of radiation, and the boars' cortisol levels were quite low.