Welcome to Free Range Free Chat, our NV focus on the news of the day about all animals all the time, from land, sky and sea.
Oh okay, we’ll include bugs if we must, and I know, I know, humans are animals too, so basically, Free Range is about our blue planet, teeming with life.
As an open thread, what you have is what we want, pet stories are always welcome and there’s not much I’d consider off-topic. Just keep video clips short– a couple of minutes at most– otherwise, they might not get watched.
On March 11, 2011, 10 years ago last week, Japan experienced Nature’s Triple Threat:
It’s been ten years since we saw the second-worst nuclear accident in history—after Chernobyl—at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in northeastern Japan after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake shook the ground for six minutes. Less than an hour later, a tsunami pummeled the country’s northern shores, bringing walls of seawater over 120 feet high, which flooded places six miles inland. Inundated emergency generators at the nuclear power plant failed, leading to a meltdown and subsequent explosion of three reactors. More than 160,000 people fled a 310-square-mile area—the size of New York City—surrounding the plant as radioactive fallout spread. Many still have not returned home.
National Geographic
What’s been the fate of the animals? The sudden disappearance of people had an unexpected upside for nature: Over the past decade, animals and plants have reclaimed the exclusion zone, where radiation levels are still too high for humans to return safely.
Though wildlife does not appear to be affected by the radiation, we can’t say for certain whether that’s true, now or in the future. . . . .[however] these living things seem to be more affected by the presence of humans than by radiation.
Source: Japan Times and Awesome Inventions and National Geographic and scitechdaily and Reuters and BoredPanda