birchbarkcanoe, I thought you might appreciate this. It's a great re-hash of our conversation the other week.
Oooh a good re-hash indeed! I'm so intrigued by the wolf population increase - wolves play a "keystone species" role in so many ecosystems, and a seven-fold increase is pretty significant! I guess the whole ecosystem is on that weird tipping point of "is this a big malformed population or are they reproducing quickly enough to avoid it?" Also those mapping studies sound FASCINATING. I know their goal is dosage, but I wonder how their general behavioral patterns could be different from, say, a "healthy" wolf-population GPS-track study. (or pick your favorite critter) And uh... ...what fun things we've brought upon our planet. One of the presentations I gave fairly frequently in my environmental ed job was about the ecological changes brought about by fire, and fires never cease to amaze me (from an ecological perspective, not a pyromaniac). I wonder that area was already prone to fire beforehand or if that's yet another repercussion of the radiation? That throws an entirely new variable out there in terms of how the ecosystem maintains itself. Wicked cool!climate change-induced radioactive wildfires.
It's amazing how much we covered in a few comments that they talked about, and expanded upon, here. If I didn't know any better, I'd say the author plagiarized us. We should get mk to compel them to cite us as sources. ;) If I had to guess, animals that travel often such as wolves, migratory birds, etc., are probably some of the healthier specimens found in Chernobyl, just by virtue that they probably don't spend all of their time their and thst time spent away gives them a bit of a reprieve. One of the things that I found interesting in this article and others like it is that why they always bring up how radiation can affect animals, they don't often talk about how some animals are more susceptible to radiation than others, due to any number of factors from food sources to migration patterns to cell cycles to over all hardiness. There is a really interesting chart out there that I'm trying to find that lists a whole bunch of various animals and how naturally resistant they are. Wikipedia has a small one on their article for Radioresistance, but it's pretty small. On the plus side though, that whole article is a great, quick primer on the topic. I think with all this climate change, between the fires and floods, the droughts and the storms, meteorologists are gonna be even more in demand than they already are.One of the presentations I gave fairly frequently in my environmental ed job was about the ecological changes brought about by fire, and fires never cease to amaze me.