The wolves are exposed to cancer-causing radiation as they roam the wastelands of the abandoned city - with researchers finding part of their genetic information seems resilient to increased risk of the disease.
  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Mutant wolves roaming the deserted streets of Chernobyl appear to have developed resistance to cancer - raising hopes the findings can help scientists fight the disease in humans.

    A nuclear reactor exploded at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine in 1986 - with more than 100,000 people evacuated from the city as the blast released cancer-causing radiation.

    Cara Love, an evolutionary biologist and ecotoxicologist at Princeton University in the US, has been studying how the Chernobyl wolves survive despite generations of exposure to radioactive particles.

    Ms Love and a team of researchers visited the CEZ in 2014 and put radio collars on the wolves so that their movements could be monitored.

    The researchers discovered that Chernobyl wolves are exposed to upwards of 11.28 millirem of radiation every day for their entire lives - which is more than six times the legal safety limit for a human.

    Ms Love presented her findings at the annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology in Seattle, Washington, last month.

    The original article contains 406 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    9 months ago

    You’re telling me that I should last my body with radiation and I’ll become immortal? Sign me up.

  • Scratch@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    And I for one welcome our Lupine overlords. I’d like to remind them of my long history of caring for their canine cousins and the potential for that to continue long into the future.

  • agitatedpotato@lemmy.world
    0·
    9 months ago

    Alternatively put, the wolves that don’t have cancer resistance do not survive Chernobyl. I feel like this should be closer to the default way we talk about evolution.

    • Uruanna@lemmy.world
      0·
      9 months ago

      That’s what natural selection is. We focus on those that survived because they developed resistance to something, but it has always meant that everybody else died and the species as a whole has moved forward.

      • agitatedpotato@lemmy.world
        0·
        9 months ago

        Sure but the headline does say ‘natural selection caused . . .’ it straight up say ‘Mutant wolves developed resistance to cancer’ did they though? Or was that mutation already present and sudden environment changes cause the other ones to die off?

        • Uruanna@lemmy.world
          0·
          9 months ago

          Cancer-causing radiations don’t cause wolves to develop cancer resistance, they cause wolves to develop cancer. Those that were more resistant survived, those that weren’t didn’t, now we have wolves that are different from those that we had before. They are mutant wolves, but the radiations didn’t make them mutants. The mutation happened before in some wolves, and their descendants survived better than those that didn’t have it. Evolution has always been like that.

          • freagle@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
            0·
            9 months ago

            So we don’t have wolves that are different from those we had before. We have the same wolves we had before and also we don’t have other wolves we also had before.

  • mr_robot@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    40 years seems like a relatively short time for natural evolutionary processes to adapt a mammal to a highly radioactive environment. That’s like 10 to 20 generations of wolf and suddenly they are cancer resistant?

    After all the needless loss of life surrounding the Chernobyl reactor explosion, finding viable cancer-resistant genetic mutations would be the ultimate silver lining.

    • Chainweasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      If you have an extremely high infant mortality rate, it won’t take that long. If the radiation kills of a high enough percentage of individuals without cancer resistance it won’t take long at all.
      Theoretically you could do it in only 2-3 generations if you had environmental factors that could give 100% of individuals without resistance cancer.

        • ℛ𝒶𝓋ℯ𝓃@pawb.social
          0·
          9 months ago

          And that trait does exist in nature already, it’s just rare and mostly useless until environmental pressures only allow those individuals to reproduce.

        • Endorkend@kbin.social
          0·
          9 months ago

          Everyone has “cancer or whatever” resistance. That’s why DNA works, it has repair mechanisms.

          Getting cancer is when that mechanism either fails or isn’t good enough to repair the damage.

          Radiation can cause an excess of damage or different type of damage than what your natural mechanism is capable of fixing.

    • Endorkend@kbin.social
      0·
      9 months ago

      A mutation for having a higher radiation resistance or higher resistance to cancer is something that already happens in nature, but in most of the animal world those are relatively useless traits, normally cancer doesn’t develop fast enough to stop procreation.

      In Chernobyl, the highly elevated radiation would normally kill animals before they can even breed. The ones that don’t have the resistance die before they get the chance, the ones that do have a higher resistance breed.

      With humans in the modern age, a resistance to cancer or radiation trait never gets the chance to become a dominant evolutionary trait as most all people only develop the cancer later in life and the ones that do more and more often can get treatment giving them a chance to procreate even when they got cancer young.

      Outside Chernobyl, there is no evolutionary pressure for a trait like that to become dominant.

      Living long enough to procreate is the primary drive in nature.

    • chaogomu@kbin.social
      0·
      9 months ago

      The thing is, the exclusion zone isn’t uniformly radioactive. The hottest spots are not areas that wild life would normally spend a lot of time near.

      Then there’s the fact that the way we’re all taught about radiation and cancer is just flat out wrong. The Linear No Threshold model that most people know was actually created by the Rockefeller Foundation in an attempt to slow the adoption of nuclear power.

      Combine those two factors, and you get stories like this, where researchers are shocked that higher than average radiation exposure doesn’t equate to a simple linear increase in cancer rate.

      Not that these wolves haven’t developed an increased resistance to radiation. But it’s not a new thing. Every living creature on this planet has mechanisms to repair DNA from radiation exposure. These wolves are simply better at it now than generations past.

  • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
    0·
    9 months ago

    … wasn’t there basically no additional cancer present in mammals over there?

    And even in humans - didn’t only thyroid cancer spiked in the months after the accident?