For years, researchers have documented weird, twisted trees, swallows troubled by tumours and even an eerie black fungus that lives inside the radioactive ruins of the reactor building itself. Some creatures might have adapted to better cope with the contamination – but this idea is notoriously difficult to prove and still hotly debated. Recently, researchers have highlighted other reasons why some animals may have flourished in this injured landscape.
Genetic mutations
Burraco and his colleagues have visited Chernobyl and the surrounding areas many times over the years, sampling more than 250 tree frogs in total. In 2022, they published data indicating that frogs inside the exclusion zone were, on average, darker than those outside the zone. They focused on locations where radiation levels were particularly high immediately after the accident in 1986.
Their hypothesis, which Burraco emphasizes remains a hypothesis, is that the dark color of some frogs – attributed to higher levels of melanin in their bodies – might somehow act as a protective barrier, reducing the effects of radiation, and that darker frogs fared better in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster. But there’s no hard proof of this yet.
Some frogs in the Chernobyl contamination zone have darker skin, which has been proposed as an adaptation to the radiation in the environment.
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