40 Years After the Disaster, Chernobyl Wolves Are Thriving

Chernobyl's worst day may have turned out to be a windfall for its wolves. As the 40th anniversary of the 1986 reactor meltdown rolled around on Sunday, scientists say wolf numbers in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone are now about seven times higher than before the disaster, thanks largely to one thing: people staying away. With more than 1,900 square miles of contaminated land in Ukraine and Belarus effectively off-limits to humans, populations of elk, roe deer, and rabbits have also surged. "The ecosystem in the exclusion zone is much better than it was before the accident," environmental scientist Jim Smith tells the Guardian, arguing that the absence of human activity has outweighed the damage of "the world's worst nuclear accident."

Researchers are now probing a more unsettling twist: the wolves' biology. A Princeton-led team has identified genetic differences in Chernobyl's gray wolves that appear to give them heightened resistance to cancer, likely an adaptation to chronic radiation, reports Gizmodo. When compared with human tumor data, 23 standout wolf genes lined up with multiple cancer types, along with signs of active immune responses. Not all creatures are thriving—some birds and rodents show clear harm from radiation—yet the zone has become a living experiment in how ecosystems, and evolution, respond when humans abruptly exit.