How Wolves Living in Chernobyl Have Become Cancer Resilient

 by Wilbur P-W

On April 26, 1986, disaster struck the small Ukrainian town of Chernobyl when a series of steam explosions led to a nuclear meltdown. The apocalyptic event impacted hundreds of thousands of people and lead to a catastrophic injury to the surrounding environment.

Nearly 40 years later, something strange is happening. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone(CEZ), a roughly 1,000 square mile perimeter around the nuclear plant, is slowly becoming one of the world’s biggest science experiments for exploring the long-term effects of ionizing radiation. While humans might have abandoned the area, other animals remained

Numerous studies have been conducted around the special area such as the 2016 research projects into tree frogs which show that frogs living inside the CEZ had different characteristics to frogs living only a few hundred miles away. Another study, conducted in 2023 demonstrated that dogs living in the CEZ had a different genetic makeup to those living only 20 miles away. 

A new project is now underway, conducted by Princetown University into the thriving wolf population of Chernobyl. Analysing the wolves has been interesting because they are apex predators (top of the food chain). This is usually a privileged part of the ecosystem but in a  neighbourhood cursed with radiation these animals are forced to eat irradiated prey that ate irradiated plants that grew in irradiated soil. It is radiation throughout the food chain. 

So far the research has shown that a sort of rapid natural selection is going on among the wolves of Chernobyl. Some wolves within the CEZ contained genes that made them more resistant to cancer than other wolves. While still getting cancer at the same rate, the severity of the cancer was less, allowing them to survive and pass these genes on to a future generation.

So the real question is can we use these genes from the wolves to make cancer resistant treatments?