Fukushima: Wild boars take over Japan's evacuated towns [video]

[rodionos]

There was a report on Chernobyl the other day. Apparently, the nature there is experiencing a renaissance of sorts with a measurable growth both in biodiversity as well as in the sheer number of species, including endangered ones.

For animal world, the radiation is the lesser of two evils, the first one being humans.

Here's a BBC article: http://www.bbc.com/russian/science/2015/02/150205_ukraine_ch...

It's in Russian, but the pictures are telling if you can't read it.

[sbarre]

Only slightly related is the excellent Arkady Renko novel Wolves Eat Dogs which is partly set in the Chernobyl exclusion zone (and touches on the wolves that have taken over that area):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolves_Eat_Dogs

Also, there was a great episode of Nature of PBS about this too:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/radioactive-wolves-introducti...

[eriknstr]

Are those wild horses? If so then that's awesome. Also, Lynx are great, happy to see them too.

[perilunar]

My first thought after reading about the wildlife around Chernobyl many years ago was that Greenpeace or similar groups should arrange 'accidental' radiation spills in threatened environments. Good for a few decades of protection.

[fusiongyro]

It's worth remembering that hundreds of thousands of people's work and billions of dollars have been spent trying to reduce the surface radiation levels around Chernobyl. A huge amount of earth was moved to bury surface radiation. Chernobyl 01:23:40 goes into a lot of detail about the sheer scale of work that was poured into the cleanup project.

It's easy to get romantic about nature, animals, biodiversity etc. but if that work had not been done the situation today would be a lot less inspiring.

[Arizhel]

The radiation levels near Chernobyl probably aren't that bad anyway; if you lived there, you could probably expect to die of cancer 2-3 decades earlier than normal, I'm guessing. So expect to die at 40-55 maybe. For modern humans, that doesn't sound all that appealing, so we stay away.

But animals don't live that long in the wild typically anyway, and tend to reproduce fairly quickly. So dying of cancer in middle-age probably isn't all that noticeable to them, because they're probably going to die by then anyway, or either accident or predation or (non-radiation-related) disease.

[alphonsegaston]

I've never seen addressed how one factors in long-term societal problems into the use of nuclear energy. There's not a country in world that hasn't experienced a civil war, invasion, or other massively destabilizing event within the span of time needed to safely manage nuclear energy and its byproducts.

After Chernobyl, I always wondered how a less authoritarian regime would respond to a similar nuclear disaster. Now that we have Fukushima, we can see the Japanese government doing something like a combination of climate change denial and media manipulation (Japanese television frequently runs pieces conflating opposition to nuclear energy with a lack of empathy for those who suffered in 3/11). It would probably work the same in the states.

[petre]

So would you rather they burn coal, which they don't have and has to be imported and intoxicate everyone with mercury and arsenic biproducts from coal burning? These two heavy metals also contaminte seafood, which the Japanese are quite fond of.

[77pt77]

> Japanese television frequently runs pieces conflating opposition to nuclear energy with a lack of empathy for those who suffered in 3/11

Can you elaborate? I don't get it.

[rb1]

Turns out, living in an environment with as low as possible background radiation might not be such a great idea either.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/09/23/is-radiat... <~~ forbes piece about this study: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/09553002.2015.106...

[mpweiher]

As with most nuclear accidents so far, the health risks from fear of radiation exceed the actual health risks from the radiation itself.

The boars don't know about the radiation and therefore do not fear it.

[_ph_]

Sorry, no. There is a distinctive health risk to radioactive radiation, and thus the regions around Fukushima and Chernobyl are evacuated from permanent residency. It is perfectly safe to do short trips into those regions. But long term, this is a considerable health risk. The boars can live there, because they are short-lived animals compared to humans, and the article doesn't say whether they do reach their natural life span even. They only seem to live long enough to procreate, which is 1-3 years for wild boars. Humans could live there as well, but they would experience an unacceptably short live. A human group can survive on a life expectancy of little more than 20 years, thats what human kind did in the past. But by modern standards this is not acceptable, and consequently those regions are not considered safe for settlement.

[masklinn]

With respect to wildlife, it's more that the health risks of radiation are significantly lower than the health risks of human presence and activities.

[lubonay]

Go hang out at Pripyat if you really think it's the fear that gets you. I volunteer as the B group, fearing radiation intensely but staying away from it. We can document whose health deteriorates first!

[sonthonax]

Wild animals have a death rate orders of magnitude greater than healthy Japanese people. The increased incidence of radiation sickness probably does little to the overall death rate of the boars.

[maxerickson]

You are conflating impact and controllable individual risk.

If there was no exclusion zone at all the impact from fear would likely still be larger. That measurement wouldn't help the people getting large radiation exposures inside the zone.

[emodendroket]

But nobody really cares if boars get cancer and die early, unlike humans.

[oftenwrong]

Why is this interesting? Wild boars in Japan are common in areas where there are few people because they are generally scared of people. If you come across one in the forest, most likely it will run away from you.

[arippberger]

They're gonna end up with some real-life Princess Mononoke demon boars.

[ctack]

DNA damage from radiation could potentially affect future generations of boars.

[kristianov]

What's scarier than wild boars are radioactive wild boars.

[Lasher]

Aren't radioactive wild boars (or rats) the first enemy you encounter on pretty much every post apocalyptic video game ever? Funny how things turn out...

[jlebrech]

Maybe we should relocate endangered species to Fukushima or Chernobyl.

Noone's going to buy a radioactive tusk.

[maxerickson]

I think lots of people would buy radioactive tusk, often because they wouldn't even know it was radioactive.

[mholmes680]

Isn't this just nature trying her best to redistribute the radiation threat? Or does radiation not work that way?

[andygates]

That's remarkably goal-orientated for a bunch of competing randomness. No, it's just that wildlife doesn't care about moderate contamination, doesn't especially care about stillbirths and birth defects, won't sue and can't be kept out.

[marze]

Did anyone see a measurement on just how radioactive the boars are?

[btreecat]

Can we name one Bebop?

[MrFantastic]

Do you want orks? Because that's how we get orcs.

[n00b101]

Or Bebop [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebop_and_Rocksteady