Dr Cara Love and a grey wolf
Images via caranlove.com
I.
Since it's Valentine's Day, I thought it might be appropriate to give a shout out to Love - Cara Love, that is, a post-doctoral research fellow at Princeton University who specialises in the ecological and evolutionary consequences of anthropogenic stressors in a variety of species worldwide, but who has recently been in the news due to her work with the grey wolves of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) ...
II.
As many readers will know, ever since the nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant exploded back in the spring of 1986, a 1000 square-mile exclusion zone has been maintained in order prevent the evacuated residents from returning to an area where radiation levels remain dangerously high.
This hasn't, however, stopped many forms of wildlife - including wolves, horses, bears, bison, and wild boar - from occupying the zone and multiplying in a contaminated but, crucially, human-free environment.
Whilst there are several scientific studies involving the wolves who live at the heart of the exclusion zone, and most of these are being conducted in the hope that they may enable researchers to better assess the impact of radiation levels on the health of the animals, it seems to be Dr Love who is being credited with the amazing discovery that Chernobyl's wolves - after generations of exposure to radioactive particles - seem to have developed resistance to cancer.
Love and a team of researchers visited the CEZ in 2014 and have been monitoring a number of wolves fitted with radio collars since then. They discovered that the animals were exposed on a daily basis to a level of radiation more than six times the legal safety limit for people.
Dr Love also found that the wolves have altered immune systems similar to cancer patients undergoing radiation treatment, but, more significantly, she identified specific parts of the wolves' genome that seemed resilient to increased cancer risk. In other words, the wolves have genetically mutated in a manner that is beneficial to their survival.
Unfortunately, recent events - the Covid pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine - have prevented Dr Love and her colleagues from returning to the CEZ in recent years. Nevertheless, she felt able to present her findings so far to a meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology in Seattle, Washington, last month.
The hope is that Love's work with mutant grey wolves will one day help to prevent (or treat) cancer in human beings. But my concern, however, is that this will inevitably lead to cruel experimentation on the wolves (and doubtless other mammals) currently inhabiting a radioactive paradise ...
