The Atlantic
By Katherine J. Wu

In the spring of 1986, in their rush to flee the radioactive plume and booming fire that burned after the Chernobyl power plant exploded, many people left behind their dogs. Most of those former pets died as radiation ripped through the region and emergency workers culled the animals they feared would ferry toxic atoms about. Some, though, survived. Those dogs trekked into the camps of liquidators to beg for scraps; they nosed into empty buildings and found safe places to sleep. In the 1,600-square-mile exclusion zone around the power plant, they encountered each other, and began to reproduce. “Dogs were there immediately after the disaster,” says Gabriella Spatola, a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health and the University of South Carolina. And they have been there ever since.

Spatola and her colleagues are now puzzling through the genomes of those survivors’ modern descendants. In identifying the genetic scars that today’s animals may have inherited, the researchers hope to understand how, and how well, Chernobyl’s canine populations have thrived. The findings could both reveal the lasting tolls of radiation and hint at traits that have helped certain dogs avoid the disaster’s worst health effects. The fates of dogs—bred and adapted to work, play, and lounge at our side—are tied to ours. And the canines we leave behind when crises strike could show us what it takes to survive the fallout of our gravest mistakes.

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