As if the war still raging in Ukraine wasn’t enough, in Chernobyl – home to the worst nuclear disaster in history – a little mystery seems to be taking place: some stray dogs with deep blue colored fur have in fact been spotted. Given the location of the sighting – and the fact that in recent years fighting has reached the area several times, causing repeated increases in radioactivity – it is perhaps natural that someone thought that the unusual coloring of the furs could be an effect of radiation. In any case, this is not the case: the explanation of the phenomenon is completely natural; at most, a little disgusting.
The NGO
The blue dogs of Chernobyl were spotted by volunteers from the non-profit Clean Futures Fund, which manages a monitoring and sterilization program in the area for the populations of local dogs and cats, descendants of pets abandoned during the evacuation of the towns near the power plant. The news was given by the NGO itself in a series of posts on Instagram, which also clarifies the probable cause of the strange coloring of the animals.
“They are simply dogs that ended up in some blue substance – we read in the Clean Futures Fund post – and we are trying to capture them so we can sterilize them, along with all the other dogs we are sterilizing this week”.
The culprit
The animals then got dirty with some chemical or natural dye that dyed their fur blue. In the past, a similar sighting – which also occurred, curiously, in the former territories of the Soviet Union – was caused by copper sulphate, a bluish chemical substance with which a pack of dogs had come into contact while exploring an abandoned chemical plant near the city of Dzerzhinsk (in Russia).
In the case of Chernobyl, however, the most probable explanation is another: the blue color almost certainly caused by the blue liquid coming from a portable toilet. “It appears that they have been rolling in a substance that has accumulated on their fur, and we suspect that the substance comes from an old portable chemical toilet that we found in the area where the dogs live – explained veterinarian Jennifer Betz to IFLScience – a hypothesis which however we cannot confirm with certainty at the moment”.
The effect of radiation
Mystery explained, therefore, without the need to bring up unlikely genetic mutations: only in films or comics are the effects of radiation so evident and harmless. In reality, living in an environment with high background radioactivity can cause diseases and tumors, or at most, select the evolutionary appearance of mutations that help to better resist the deleterious effects of radiation.
Indeed, the Chernobyl exclusion zone has been used for years to study these phenomena, as in a gigantic open-air laboratory where hundreds of animal and plant species thrive despite the potentially harmful levels of radiation to which they are exposed. Research has suggested, for example, that Chernobyl wolves may have developed mutations that make them more resistant to tumors. And the dogs themselves have been studied genetically to try to discover if and how their genome has changed after living in the area for generations. Indeed, notable differences have emerged compared to dog populations inhabiting neighboring areas, potentially linked to continuous exposure to high levels of radiation. But nothing that can dye them blue, at least for now.