Chernobyl nuclear disaster creates ‘mutant frogs’ 36 years after catastrophe!

36 years after a cataclysmic explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant unleashed one of the deadliest nuclear disasters in history, ‘mutant’ black frogs are now spawning nearby. The Eastern tree frogs (Hyla Orientalis), a species of frog found in this region, generally have bright green skin, but several have recently appeared with dark or pigmented skin.

The study on the evolution of these frogs was published in Evolutionary Applications. Scientists hypothesise that the frogs’ darker skin may help them live in the exclusion zone. The frogs were discovered by the researchers on their first night in Chernobyl, according to Germán Orizaola, a researcher at the Spain’s University of Oviedo and a co-author of the study.

According to Orizaola, ‘We know that melanin protects from the damage produced by numerous forms of radiation, from UV to ionising radiation – the kind at Chernobyl’. Between 2017 and 2019, Orizaola and his co-author Pablo Burraco gathered more than 200 male frog samples from roughly a dozen various breeding ponds with differing radiation exposures, according to TWC. The frogs in the exclusion zone, which covers 10,000 square miles around ground zero, were significantly darker than those outside of it.

However, the darkest frog populations did not correspond with the areas that are currently most radioactive. Although the darker frogs were more common in the regions that were worst hit at the time of the crisis. Natural selection of the fittest may have aided darker frogs in thriving and dominating the exclusion zone because they would have had a higher chance of surviving the 1986 disaster.

‘They ought to have fared better than typical green frogs in terms of survival and reproduction. The presence of these black frogs would have become predominate within the exclusion zone over time—10 to 12 generations of frogs have since occurred’.  Further research is required, the researchers said, to ‘establish the underlying mechanisms and evolutionary repercussions of the patterns revealed here’.