Hummingbirds/Bird Brains

Issue #24.14 :: 04/06/2011 - 04/12/2011
Bird Brains Tell Tale of Radiation Damage

USC Researchers Study Flora and Fauna around Chernobyl

BY CRAIG BRANDHORST

You can learn a lot from a bird brain — especially if that bird brain spends half the year nesting in the forests and abandoned farmlands surrounding Chernobyl.

For the past several years, USC biology professor Timothy Mousseau and his colleague Anders Møller have been doing just that: studying migratory and non-migratory birds (plus a wide range of insect and plant species) across swaths of the Ukraine and Belarus affected by the 1986 nuclear disaster in an effort to better understand the effects of low-dose radioactive contaminants on living organisms, including humans.

And what Mousseau and Møller have found so far is less than encouraging, as their research contradicts some of the more optimistic findings that have circulated through the mainstream media in recent years.

“We’ve had this ongoing feud with some members of the biological community who have studied in Chernobyl,” Mousseau says. “They’ve given us a really hard time in the media over our findings, but they base their argument, really, on no data. They’ve made suggestions that mammal populations are thriving, that it’s this Eden, that there’s this wildlife refuge that is overflowing with large animals in the same way that you might find at Yellowstone or other refuges, and that is so far from the truth.”

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