War in Ukraine threatens an intriguing piece of wildlife science
A long-term study of radiation’s effects on nature may be over
THE MELTDOWN in 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine was a human tragedy. But it was also a biological opportunity. Since 2000 Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina and Anders Moller of the Ecology, Systematics and Evolution Laboratory in Orsay, near Paris, have run the Chernobyl Research Initiative Lab in collaboration with a dozen Ukrainian colleagues. They have looked at how animals and plants in what is now, by default, a wildlife sanctuary, have adjusted to their radioactive surroundings.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “A casualty of war”
From the March 19th 2022 edition
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