Chernobyl animals thrive in exclusion zone without humans (Ukraine)

By Roland Oliphant

Wildlife including wolf, elk and wild boar are thriving around Chernobyl since the area was deserted by humans after the world's worst nuclear accident.

Man is even more deadly to wildlife than a nuclear disaster, according to new research which has found animal populations in the Chernobyl exclusion zone have unexpectedly soared 30 years after the world’s worst nuclear accident.

Land surrounding Chernobyl - which was evacuated after the 1986 catastrophic nuclear accident - is now teeming with elk, deer and wolves.

About 116,000 people were evacuated from a 1,600 square mile exclusion zone around Chernobyl, on the border of Ukraine and Belarus, after the nuclear power plant there exploded.

An exclusion zone remains closed to human habitation, and researchers believe the lack of humans has led to a thriving populations of wild mammals - despite the threat of radiation.

The report, published in Current Biology, used helicopter surveys and tracks in newly-fallen snow to trace the population of wildlife in the exclusion zone.

They found that rarer species including European lynx, which were previously absent, have returned to the area.

They also documented a European brown bear in the exclusion zone - a species not believed to have been seen in the area for nearly a century.

Meanwhile other large species including wild boar, roe deer, and fox were thriving, while the wolf population was several times higher than in comparable, non-contaminated reserves. Overall population numbers do not seem to be reduced in areas of higher radiation.

"In purely environmental terms, if you take the terrible things that happened to the human population out of the equation, as far as we can see at this stage, the accident hasn't done serious environmental damage,” Professor Jim Smith of Portsmouth University, one of the study’s authors, told the Press Association.

"Indeed by accident it's created this kind of nature reserve."

He added: "We're not saying radiation is good for animals, but human habitation and exploitation of the landscape is worse.”

The proliferation of wildlife in the 1,600 square mile exclusion zone is well documented.

In 2013, police and hunters in Belarus launched a a special operation to hunt wolves from the exclusion zone that were raiding farms in Belarus’ Gomel region.

In November last year researchers set up 42 camera traps in the Ukrainian side of the exclusion zone to monitor the growth of wildlife in the area.

The year-long project, which is set to close in December, has so far captured images of endangered species including bears, European Bison, and the rare Przewalski's horse.

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