There's apparently a bit of an epidemic going on in the forests of Southern Germany, where roving bands of "radioactive" wild boars are biting people and aggressively charging at them with their tusks. The boars, who are apparently so radioactive that their meat has been deemed unsafe to eat, have become this way due to nuclear bombs.
From The Daily Beast:
While deranged packs of radioactive pigs might seem more suited for a post-apocalyptic video game, they certainly exist and researchers have been working to understand the mysterious origins of their irradiated nature for years. Luckily, some new research offers an answer as to why the swine are imbued with radiation: nuclear bombs.
A study published Wednesday in the journal American Chemical Society found nuclear weapons testing across the globe released enough fallout into the atmosphere to irradiate the wild pigs. The findings further underscore the dangers of nuclear testing and weapons for countries around the world—even if they’re not the ultimate target of bombs.
“[The] long-forgotten atmospheric nuclear weapons tests and their fallout still cast a shadow on the environment,” co-author Georg Steinhauser, a radiochemist at Vienna University of Technology, told The Daily Beast. “Just because they took place 60 years ago doesn’t mean that they no longer impact the ecosystem.”
Scientists have known for years that a population of wild boars in southern Germany contained incredibly high levels of radioactive cesium. They long suspected that much of this is due to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster that released enormous amounts of cesium-137—a specific isotope produced by nuclear reactors—into the air where it spread over Europe and, eventually, leached into the boar’s food source.
However, the boars differed from other creatures in the region in notable ways. For one, the amount of cesium-137 greatly declined in other animals throughout southern Germany due to its half-life. Yet, the wild boars remained fairly radioactive. That’s why Steinhauser and his colleagues decided to investigate.
After testing the meat from various wild boars, they discovered that the animals actually contained a high level of cesium-135—which is a much longer lasting radioactive isotope that’s produced primarily by nuclear weapons exploding. Whenever there was a nuke test, the cesium would spread throughout the Earth and eventually settle down to the ground. The isotopes eventually made their way to the wild boars’ underground food source of deer truffles—which soaked up more and more cesium over time like a sponge.
“The atmospheric nuclear weapons tests conducted by any nation impacted the entire northern hemisphere quite evenly,” Steinhauser explained. “There is an enormous upward draft after an explosion; by the time the fallout falls down to Earth, the radioactive material has evenly distributed in the higher atmosphere.”
Good Lord, this sounds absolutely terrifying and seriously like something out of a horror movie.
