Chernobyl is still topical and even more so after his series has become one of the best rated in IMDB history. Tourism in the area continues to grow and with it the questions about the current state of the flora and fauna that live there. In 33 years, the exclusion zone has gone from being the scene of one of the greatest catastrophes to being called a Radioactive Biosphere Reserve due to the diversity of animals and plants that currently roam freely.
However, although this is the case today, in 1986 plants were the ones that best responded to radioactivity, adapting to it and fighting cancer much better than animals.
3 years. It was the time that the surviving Ukrainian flora needed to adapt to the new radioactive context. The plants that survived the explosion were all those that were beyond the 10 km2 near the reactor. In fact, at that distance there was a pine forest that ended up being called “red forest” because it absorbed the energy ejected by the reactor on the night of the catastrophe.
Why did they survive? Unlike animals, according to the BBC biochemist Stuart Thompson, plants are capable of adapting to the most extreme conditions, among other things, because they cannot move from the ground. For this reason, instead of having a defined and organized cell structure, they have another that is constantly changing and is capable of creating new cells if necessary. And this is what they do in a context of genetic alteration.
The cancer does not spread. While radioactivity and its harmful particles kill animal cells and tissues, plants have the virtue of being able to replace damaged structures and create new cells, specifically the type they need. In addition, they learn to work around cancerous tissue and do not spread cancer cells to the rest of the plant. The latter is thanks to the rigidity of plant tissues, which are often not connected to each other.
In this way, even if the cell of a plant suffers mutations (genetic alterations) in its sequencing, it does not have to affect the rest of the cells since they do not multiply arbitrarily as happens in animals.
a particular DNA. Another factor that makes radioactivity so dangerous is its power to directly penetrate cells’ DNA and modify them, causing irreparable damage. Unlike animals, plants are able to resort to chemical mechanisms that they used when the natural radioactivity of the Earth was higher. Thus, in order to protect their DNA, they use this genetic information, increasing their survival rate compared to animals.
3,940 cancer deaths. It is precisely the cellular organization structure of animals that made radioactivity deadly in this case. Unlike plants, animal cells are very sensitive to radiation and, at low doses, mutations appear that lead to tumors. The fact that all our cells are connected and organized in the form of tissues means that, when the sequence of a cell is altered, it is forced to replicate and transmit this information to the rest of the body.
The rapid spread of cancer cells created as a result of a radioactive context such as Chernobyl leaves figures around 4,000 deaths from cancer and according to data compiled by the World Health Organization, after reviewing exposed civilians directly or indirectly to this type of particles. Despite the fact that the WHO data has been called into question on different occasions, to date it is the only official figure together with the one given by the USSR three decades ago and located at 31 deaths.
Image: Unsplash