Science today, not fairy tales. Although the Brothers’ Grimm The Wolf and the seven young Goats was a favorite of mine due to clever trickery and happy ending. Oh, do I like happy endings. Not always true for German fairy tales, or German anything, but I digress.

Goats first: European scientists have observed Alpine ibex, a species of mountain goat, across the last many years. They found that with increasingly hotter temperatures, the goats are shifting their diurnal habits to more nocturnal explorations, to avoid the heat.

Maybe the best move available to them, and one could celebrate their adaptability. But the shift involves numerous problems. If your visual system is set up to function in the day time, it is difficult to see at night. This matters for finding your footing in the craggy, mountainous landscapes where these mammals live, leading to slower movement and more potential accidents in this treacherous environment. More importantly, it is difficult to spot the vegetation that is your food source, signaled by color, washed out in the dark; less food leading to malnutrition is going to affect population density. Finding mates also becomes more difficult, again resulting in shrinking population numbers.

Pica and Marmots in action

Another complication is the exposure to nocturnal predators, wolves in particular, who the goats can avoid if grazing during the day. The impact of heat seems to be threatening enough at this point in time that goats are shifting their habits despite the looming dangers. One wonders what that will imply for the years to come.

Plenty of wild goats visible on a hike I took a decade ago in the North Cascades’ Mount Baker region. Goat Mountain is an 8.2 miles round trip with a steep elevation gain of 3.100 ft to a summit of 5.600 ft. We camped overnight (kids carried the gear, I was spoiled with carrying only a small backpack, water and camera) before hiking to the top, and then down to a glacial lake. It is the most beautiful hike through hemlock and pine forests, remnants of lava of the 1980 explosion of Mt. St. Helens, wildflower meadows and eventually phenomenal vistas of the surrounding mountains.

It was August, with snow banks on the summit and the lake still covered with remnants of ice. Reports from last year (2023) showed no snow and a completely ice-free lake already by the end of June.

Wolves were spotted in the Mount Baker wilderness area for the first time since the 1930s in 2014. I did not see any, ever, in the wild. But I have recently read about research with wolves that posits some fascinating questions.

Princeton University evolutionary biologists and toxicologists have tracked and examined wolves in and around the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) and compared them to wolf populations in neighboring wildlife areas. Chernobyl was the site of the catastrophic nuclear accident in 1986 in Ukraine, with one of its 4 reactors blowing, releasing huge amount of radioactivity into the atmosphere. Over 300.000 people had to be relocated, with countless health issues caused by radiation exposure emerging over the years. The area around the explosion is now an exclusion zone and the reactor itself encased in concrete sarcophagus, improved in 2016 to a structure supposed to contain the radioactive remnants for at least a century.

If you look closely, the goats are little white dots to the left of the snow field and also in the island within.

It turns out that the CEZ wolves have flourished – their population is seven fold compared to those in neighboring regions, despite the chronic, low-dose, multigenerational exposure to ionizing radiation they have been exposed to for the last 4 decades. The researchers speculate that two factors play a role in this advantage: natural selection of cancer-resistant or cancer-resilient genes in the animals and not having to deal with the stressors of human activity, in particular hunting. The removal of human threat alone is considered a huge survival benefit.

Wolves are at the top of the food pyramid, which means all of the radioactivity accumulated by those lower in the food chain ends up in their diet. It could be the case that those who have cancer resistant or resilient genes have survived more frequently than those who don’t and have transferred these genes to their offspring, creating a selective gene pool. If they are resilient, they might get cancer at the same rate as other wolves, but survive longer with a stronger immune system response. If they are resistant, they won’t get cancer as much in the first place. The burning question is, of course, if looking at their blood cell composition reveals some clues to where immunity is lodged. The researchers also looked at the genomes of the exclusion zone wolves compared to other populations and found “that the fastest evolving [genome] regions within Chernobyl are in and around genes that we know have some role in cancer immune response or the antitumor immune response in mammals.”

The implication for human health are huge – oncological research might benefit from these findings if genetic information can be isolated and translated into the human genome. Of course, just when you think you are on to something massively important, it all grinds to a halt: the research was impacted first by the pandemic, and for the last two years by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, making it impossible to continue data collection. War’s ripple effects.

Music today is neither goat nor wolf, but named after the properties of another great beast: Elephantine. The album by Egyptian Jazz musician Maurice Louca and his many northern European colleagues (he spends his time between Berlin and Cairo) is intense and requires close listening. You’ll be rewarded by an amazing mix of musical cultures and styles. Not easy listening, though.