Chernobyl exclusion zone, better than a wildlife refuge

[PB666]

http://www.sci-news.com/biology/science-wildlife-chernobyl-exclusion-zone-03308.html

There have been a number of news articles about this the kast few days here is one.

Basically predators are doing better. The reason here is not because of the radiation, but because of the emmense size of the refuge you can have more complex ecosystems.

[Ethanadams]

I like the mushrooms that somehow eat the radiation in the reactor

[baggers]

Main radiation effect on species survivability, are individuals became sterile after a certain amount of time.

All radiations diseases are "side effects" to survivability of wildlife compared to a sterilization.

So, imagine an amount of radiation, heavy enought for making a mamal sterile ni 3 years of exposition.

Humanity is condamned.

But many, many mamals will easily survive, beacuse they were fertile at age 1, and have theyr first farrowing at age 1,5

[Nothalogh]

Main radiation effect on species survivability, are individuals became sterile after a certain amount of time.

All radiations diseases are "side effects" to survivability of wildlife compared to a sterilization.

So, imagine an amount of radiation, heavy enought for making a mamal sterile ni 3 years of exposition.

Humanity is condamned.

But many, many mamals will easily survive, beacuse they were fertile at age 1, and have theyr first farrowing at age 1,5

Correct, the lethality of the radiological contamination is outside of the reproductive cycle time of most fauna

[baggers]

Note that in these scenario, natural selection will work fully, and "quickly fertile" spécimens will have an advantage over other.

Moose populations for example, can became fertile at various ages:

http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/z96-108?journalCode=cjz

Individual variation was large; 10 (1.3%) out of 776 yearlings were classified as previously pregnant, and must have become fertile during their first year of life. Among 2-year-old females 31.2% were mature, while the majority (80.5%) of females became mature at 3 years of age. Age at maturity, calculated as the age at which 50% of the females were mature, was also highly variable among populations and ranged between 2.06 and 3.17 years

No doubt they have the "genetical package" to adapt (by natural selection) to these sort of threat.

[PB666]

Note that in these scenario, natural selection will work fully, and "quickly fertile" spécimens will have an advantage over other.

Moose populations for example, can became fertile at various ages:

http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/z96-108?journalCode=cjz

No doubt they have the "genetical package" to adapt (by natural selection) to these sort of threat.

DNA damage and repair adapt quickly, the enzymes can increase 10 fold immediately when stressed, in addition the radiation response can can evolve. Most of the radiation risk is actually in the dirt not in the plants, so that unless they consume the dirt they can survive. Wolves reacted very positively, much older females reproduced, but they produced more offspring and a higher percentage died, the end result was a more robust population. In addition by producing more offspring the chance a positive selective defense against radiation occurs, therefore protecting future offspring even more.

Herbivores that graze high off the ground or water plants might be immune to ground based isotopes, other herbivores like sheep and goats would be more susceptible to radiation damage.

The biggest hazard is the ingestion hazard, as the heavy metals accumulate and increase the dosage rate many fold. They also accumulate up the food chain. As a consequence wolves and other predators might be targeting certain prey species and avoiding others.

Edited October 8, 2015 by PB666

[problemecium]

Life finds a way

[lajoswinkler]

We don't see the damage the fauna gets because we don't monitor it. Life did not adapt to the radiological contamination there. It just thrives on the fact there aren't humans around. Our noise, presence and activities are far more damaging than the contamination present.

Rest assured, there's lots of miscarriages among the animals, and lots of embryos that just don't make it and are absorbed by the organism. There are no freak animals walking around because such animals can't survive. The fittest survive, and you aren't fit if you have two heads or no eyes, or your neural tube hasn't closed up completely.

Also, there aren't tiny baby skeletons around because bacteria and fungi take care of cartilaginous bodies very fast.

I like the mushrooms that somehow eat the radiation in the reactor

The mushrooms do not eat the radiation. Radiation is rays going around at basically light speed.

Some of the mushrooms might concentrate certain radioisotopes like caesium-137 ions in their tissues, and are therefore dangerous to eat. They just concentrate it as they concentrate sodium ions. Nuclei aren't affected by chemical processes.

Edited October 8, 2015 by lajoswinkler

[andrewas]

There was a species of fungus that developed greater concentrations of melanin, allowing it to derive energy from gamma rays. I dont think they know the exact mechanism yet, but it does grow much more quickly when exposed to radiation.

[KerikBalm]

This is what he's talking about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus

They don't reduce radiation in any way, but they make use of the energy.

[lajoswinkler]

That fungus certainly does not use gamma rays directly, as those poorly interact with light nuclei present in living organisms and wreck the chemical bonds at random. The mechanism obviously uses radiolysis of water - when gamma photon passes through water, it will leave a trail of various ions, lots of them radical ions, which is how gamma radiation actually damages the organism. Almost all of the damage is done this way.

This species obviously has the ability to use the concentration gradient of those ions and the energy released during their recombination with other water molecules to gain more benefit than it causes damage (and yes, the damage is inevitable).

[PB666]

That fungus certainly does not use gamma rays directly, as those poorly interact with light nuclei present in living organisms and wreck the chemical bonds at random. The mechanism obviously uses radiolysis of water - when gamma photon passes through water, it will leave a trail of various ions, lots of them radical ions, which is how gamma radiation actually damages the organism. Almost all of the damage is done this way.

This species obviously has the ability to use the concentration gradient of those ions and the energy released during their recombination with other water molecules to gain more benefit than it causes damage (and yes, the damage is inevitable).

double strand breaks, satellite DNA and transcription facilitated gene duplication, vegetative cell selection.....its not like cancer is harmful to fungi, and you have a critter with a 1000 fold capacity to repair. Note that this process takes off in the first instance because something damages its DNA. Imagine the early earth, being bombarded with asteroids iridium and tons of C14 being generated all over the place, and yet life. I don't think its in spite of the radiation, its probably because of the radiation that we see phototrophs as early as 3.25 billion years ago, the organisms are actively searchimg out replacement sources of ionizing radiation to exploit.

Yeah, chernobyl shrooms, i wonder if they will ever show up on the menu of some exotic Asian restuarant next to live monkey brains. ;^}

[KerikBalm]

I'm not convinced that isolated early banded iron formations are diagnostic of photosynthetic life, thus I'm not convinced that we had direct phototrophs that early

[PB666]

I'm not convinced that isolated early banded iron formations are diagnostic of photosynthetic life, thus I'm not convinced that we had direct phototrophs that early

probably earlier, when ever you have some evidence it tends to represent a stage of evolution when function results in typhonomic representation. At least is the trend in mammalian and late primate evolution.

This is well before the great oxygenation event so proabaly there is some dependency on commensal communities with other bacteria for survival, likely very specific relationships that may have been localized.

Oh, and to add, i would have a bigger problem with the dating as this is where major revisions have occurred in the past.

Edited October 8, 2015 by PB666

[KerikBalm]

Or there was some local non biological source.

Heck, less than 2 billion years ago we had natural nuclear reactors. 3 billion years ago the U-235 concentration would have been over double that.... who knows what sort of strange chemistry you could get going on back then with that much energy release... I don't...

The paper uses conservative language about their proposed explanation, you sould too, rather than stating it as fact after 1 paper that came out recently nad hasn't had time for review by the wider scientific community.

Lajos... your explanation doesn't seem really plausible to me either.

At the moment the mechanism is unknown... leave it at that unless you are actually going to do experiments to try and figure it out...

http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000457

The paper focuses not on just Gamma rays, but ionizing radiation in general, and the data does seem to suggest a role of melanin.

[PB666]

Or there was some local non biological source.

Heck, less than 2 billion years ago we had natural nuclear reactors. 3 billion years ago the U-235 concentration would have been over double that.... who knows what sort of strange chemistry you could get going on back then with that much energy release... I don't...

The paper uses conservative language about their proposed explanation, you should too, rather than stating it as fact after 1 paper that came out recently nad hasn't had time for review by the wider scientific community.

Yes but conservation goes two directions, and the one precedence that seems to be common is that when things get redated, they are overwhelmingly dated to earlier dates, that of course cannot correct bad science with regard to interpretation, but we should also factor in the fact that the mechanics of photosynthesis may have been poor, and so its affect is only sometimes apparent. Conservation increases the confidence interval in both directions in this case, not just in one direction. I mean there are some folks that still hold the C/H tMRCA to 2.5 million years, which could be true to some extent, but if one looks at the common gene thresholds most of the genetics points well above the first tMRCA estimated by Sarich in the 1970s. White in his work on a. ramidus is basically putting a silver stake in the heart of Sariches tMRCA was +/- 1my and how was that assumed.

In science theory the problem that any paleontological result can assume the confidence interval is always limited by observables. But the precedence in the science history of paleontologicals is that confidence limits based on observables are almost never correct and almost never broad enough. This is why time and time again we have branchpoints replaced beyond the confidence limits. Thus the correct answer is if you can establish a conservative anchor point, for example phototrophs existed 2.8 billion years ago, then the problem is in assessing earlier confidence as to when they existed, its not being liberal, its simply stating that with numerous knowns missing, its really hard to say what these are.

I know that this sounds like obfuscating the argument, but the real obfuscator is the discovery process, unfortunately its looking the gift horse in the mouth, but occassionally looking in the mouth finds a horse with weird teeth. It has proved itself to be problematic time and time again, because almost all entry processes are plagued by logical errors and subjective assumptions. There is a desire on the part of journal editors to actually favor these older misassumptions over newer and more careful analysis, and this greatly slowed the process.

1. How sure are we that we have the tools to identify meaningful transitions from non-phototrophic to fully phototrophic. Do we actually know what the transitional chemistry might have been like, and are we actively looking for that?

2. How sure are we that we can identify what the first phototrophs were.

3. How sure are we that we found the earliest location where they exhibited this behavior.

Edited October 9, 2015 by PB666

[KerikBalm]

All you had to do was say this:

"its probably because of the radiation that we see phototrophs possibly as early as 3.25 billion years ago if not earlier"

Which makes it clear its not certain

instead of:

"its probably because of the radiation that we see phototrophs as early as 3.25 billion years ago"

Which makes it seem like its an establish fact, not a conclusion from 1 paper, 1 week old.

"the one precedence that seems to be common is that when things get redated, they are overwhelmingly dated to earlier dates"

That is bad logic...

You could have said "the one precedence that seems to be common is that when possible biochemistries are examined, they are overwhelmingly found to be more diverse than thought", and used that as your basis for saying life on Earth can use Arsenic in place of Phosphor in its DNA backbone... on that basis of that terrible *Science the journal* paper.

Stop treating every new paper's conclusions as established facts, that is all I ask.

[PB666]

This argument is getting really pedantic and it does not reflect the great overall uncertainty in the foundation of biology for the period.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Heavy_Bombardment

It is possible to be somewhat relaxed in the second case, phototrophs because we don't know how developed life was in the first.

to give an lets say currently phototrophs are estimated to have evolved 3 and new paper says 3.23. That is a difference between two estimates of 0.23. The current estimate of the origin of life is between 3.3 and 4.2 that variation is around 0.9, even if we argue phototrophs at 0.5 and it were not to be true, the statistical variance of the first case is still twice as great. All the paper is arguing is that evidence exists that phototrophs evolved sooner. The we threw arsenic into the equation, a red herring.

fundementally this is not about the age, all though ages have a meaning. Its about the process of examination. Sobtwo theories lets set them side by side.

Theory 1 life evolved on mars first or earth first and was transporter to the other ir life evolved independently. There are three or more possibilities however one is right the others are not, in part or in full. alternative example is arsenic. This an argument concernig playsible alternatives.

Theory 2 major is the assessment of a relative timeframe in which photo synthesis evolved. In this occupation the ranges if when life and when photosynthesis evolved are changing with new data. In this case the major facts are not in question life arose before phototrophs. In fact chemosynthesis and a variety of energy generation schemes had developed.

This is not obfuscating reality. So the critical issue is not the basics, its in the obsevations, what qualifies as an observation. The problem is that the criteria are completely different because of the founding logic. How come

Lets say last year life was estimated to be 3.0 billion years in age, it woukd be sikky to look for older phototrophs, and all the phototroph evidence older than this date would either go unobserved or interpreted to mean something else. Unfortunately this is the way science works, but its the lingua franca so we wont go there. This year the age of life is reestimated at 3.8. So what about data from last year regarding the overlooked evidence of phototrophs is it now evidence, nope. So the problem here is perspective.

Your basic argument is that this is one evidence, that is true, but up until about ten years ago that evidence would have been disregarded as meaningless, even as people are presenting even more controversial theories about life during the late heavy bombardment period. this is not the first time this has happened in PA, it happens repeatedly. It like the evidence for symbolic art, the problem is not that we have shockingly old dates for symbolic art, the MAJOR problem is that past generations a paleontologist summarily excluded the possibility. It was in fact one find, blombos cave, that blew the doors open. Once peoples eyes were open, then all of a sudden many artefacts of the same age appeared. So basically for 100 years of study the limit to symbolic art was 30ky and then one new find and it jumps to basically 100 ky. But even do these reformulators were dragged kicking and screaming by evidence from human DNA that AMH and there cognatove capacities must have migrated from africa, the reason we weren't finding them in africa is we expected them to have evolved not-there which was a leading belief of people who were born not-there.

Nature does not change for our finds, the most important point is the new finds reveal our bias and ignorance. It also reveals the flaws in our logic and the discovery process. This is the reason I keep pointing out

Newton errored in the fact that he ignored lorentz transformations and gravity as proposed by galileo.

Einstien errored in not giving enough credance to uncertainty and quantum effects

Thevprocess dies not stop withbone generation, the bias is core tonthe process of discovery, if we did manage to get all the ideas right it woukd be more a matter of luck than good discovery logic.

There always two ways of looking at truth, one is to pat ourselves and say look how great we are for uncovering the truth, the other is to reflect on the fact that it was never covered, except in our own minds.

[magnemoe]

We don't see the damage the fauna gets because we don't monitor it. Life did not adapt to the radiological contamination there. It just thrives on the fact there aren't humans around. Our noise, presence and activities are far more damaging than the contamination present.

Rest assured, there's lots of miscarriages among the animals, and lots of embryos that just don't make it and are absorbed by the organism. There are no freak animals walking around because such animals can't survive. The fittest survive, and you aren't fit if you have two heads or no eyes, or your neural tube hasn't closed up completely.

Also, there aren't tiny baby skeletons around because bacteria and fungi take care of cartilaginous bodies very fast.

The mushrooms do not eat the radiation. Radiation is rays going around at basically light speed.

Some of the mushrooms might concentrate certain radioisotopes like caesium-137 ions in their tissues, and are therefore dangerous to eat. They just concentrate it as they concentrate sodium ions. Nuclei aren't affected by chemical processes.

Main predator for larger animals in most of the world are humans. Exception is very remote places.

No hunting in the Chernobyl zone so main predator is gone.

Nature don't follow human safety rules. Yes the cancer risk is far to high for us to accept but its far less than the danger from hunters outside.

Result is more animals even if most hunting regulations focus on maximizing the number of animals you can shoot over many years.

[lajoswinkler]

double strand breaks, satellite DNA and transcription facilitated gene duplication, vegetative cell selection.....its not like cancer is harmful to fungi, and you have a critter with a 1000 fold capacity to repair. Note that this process takes off in the first instance because something damages its DNA. Imagine the early earth, being bombarded with asteroids iridium and tons of C14 being generated all over the place, and yet life. I don't think its in spite of the radiation, its probably because of the radiation that we see phototrophs as early as 3.25 billion years ago, the organisms are actively searchimg out replacement sources of ionizing radiation to exploit.

Yeah, chernobyl shrooms, i wonder if they will ever show up on the menu of some exotic Asian restuarant next to live monkey brains. ;^}

Ionizing radiation at the exclusion zone, in the form of tissue-accumulated radioisotopes, is far worse than what Earth encountered back then. Its properties and magnitude are such that they present more of a constant hammer that smacks anything that dares to "show off".

It is very much possible (actually, expected) that radiological conditions in early Earth helped to drive the evolution forward, those are low levels compared to what organisms experience in the Zone.

Basically the only reason why life flourished there is the lack of human interference. We're a far larger annoyance.

[KerikBalm]

The we threw arsenic into the equation, a red herring.

What?

Theory 1 life evolved on mars first or earth first and was transporter to the other ir life evolved independently.

What?

Seriously dude... you have a problem with non-sequiturs... ... are you talking about?

There are three or more possibilities however one is right the others are not, in part or in full. alternative example is arsenic. This an argument concernig playsible alternatives.

What? .... why do I bother, if I was given this statement as part of a turing test, I'd say it was a computer.

Your basic argument is that this is one evidence

My argument is that you shouldn't state things as if they were established facts when they are not.

I'm fine with revising dates earlier if thats what is warranted after careful review of the evidence.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513781/moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life/

In light of that paper, are you going to start saying the LCA of Earth life existed 10 billion years ago?

I hope not, but I wouldn't be surprised.

[Guest]

- - - Updated - - -

[PB666]

What?

What?

Seriously dude... you have a problem with non-sequiturs... ... are you talking about?

What? .... why do I bother, if I was given this statement as part of a turing test, I'd say it was a computer.

The point is quite obvious if you calm down, you were pulling a red herring because you were comparing apples to kelp fronds.

My argument is that you shouldn't state things as if they were established facts when they are not.

Yes and my point is that there are no provable established facts with dating, they are at best estimates with high confidence ranges, never really better than that.

I'm fine with revising dates earlier if thats what is warranted after careful review of the evidence.

You make a false assumption that the process was careful to begin with, from 1985 to around 2000 I studied this problem rather intensely, I can tell you that when it comes to dating

the confidence intervals are almost always understated. The test themselves by their very nature are indirect and carry a list of assumptions that are often mentioned in the literature and not included in the final

works

Does that make one publication immediately valid because all other publications have problems. No, but it does mean that we are only talking about degrees, nothing more, thats why I say you are being pedantic

when we combine evidence with trends and precedence, there is actually a trivial difference in what you call 'carefullness'

If you want to see an example of this look up the LM3 controversy (Mungo Lake man 3), and read all the papers, in the end what you may find is that all arguments were wrong to a degree. The most likely explanation to a statistician is neither side carefully looked at their confidence ranges. There are a serious of papers and counter papers presented, each of which to this day manage to dance around each other, but not actually address their own statistics.

So yeah, I am talking about actual relevant examples, so if you want to debate this further you need cogent arguements that apply to the argument not red herrings. Otherwise I will not respond.