A shape the size of a bench turns just under the surface of the reservoir beside the Chernobyl plant.<\/p>\n
Visitors film it, and the footage travels under a caption about radiation and a mutant fish<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The Chernobyl catfish is one of the most reliably wrong animal stories on the internet, and the correction is more interesting than the myth.<\/p>\n The largest specimen ever taken from that water for measurement was 5 feet 5 inches<\/strong> long.<\/p>\n That is a big animal and a completely normal one for the species, which is a wels catfish.<\/p>\n The reservoir around it is the stranger subject, because it was never a lake<\/strong> and was never meant to outlive the plant.<\/p>\n It has outlived the plant anyway, and it is currently in the process of disappearing.<\/p>\n The dates in most retellings are off by a few years, and the order matters.<\/p>\n Filling began in 1976, before a single reactor<\/strong> at the site had produced any power.<\/p>\n Units 1 and 2 came online in 1977 and 1978, and the pond was enlarged in 1981 to carry Units 3 and 4, which followed in 1983 and 1984.<\/p>\n So it did end up serving four reactors, but not from the start and not by original design.<\/p>\n At full size it covered roughly 9 square miles<\/strong>, held about 40 billion gallons, and averaged 22 feet deep with a maximum near 61 feet.<\/p>\n The odd part is the elevation. The whole thing sat about 23 feet higher<\/strong> than the Pripyat River running alongside it.<\/p>\n A pond perched above a river only stays there while something keeps pushing water uphill.<\/p>\n The last operating reactor was shut down in December 2000, and the usual version of the story ends the pumping there.<\/p>\n It did not end there. The pumping station kept topping the reservoir up from the Pripyat until May of 2014<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Only then was it switched off and the level allowed to fall, on purpose, as part of decommissioning.<\/p>\n Planners expected roughly 70 percent of the bottom<\/strong> to come up out of the water, which is about 6 square miles of exposed sediment.<\/p>\n Willow and birch have moved onto the drained margins, and the pond is now a set of pools<\/strong> rather than one body of water.<\/p>\n Wels catfish did not arrive because of anything that happened in 1986.<\/p>\n They were already in the Pripyat River, and the pond is simply warm slow water<\/strong> connected to their home range.<\/p>\n What changed is that nobody has been allowed to fish there for decades, and no larger predator uses the reservoir.<\/p>\n The species record stands at about 9 feet and 287 pounds<\/strong>, with a maximum reported age of 80 years.<\/p>\n Those are the outer limits for wels catfish anywhere in Europe, not a Chernobyl figure, and the pond’s fish sit well below them.<\/p>\n The reserve’s own ecologist puts it in one line, which is that the longer they live, the bigger they get<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Two studies get quoted about these fish, and they are usually merged into one claim that neither of them makes.<\/p>\n The first, from 1996, looked at channel catfish, an American species stocked into Soviet cooling ponds because the warm outflow suited it.<\/p>\n Those fish showed measurable DNA strand breaks, and the amount of damage tracked the radiocesium load<\/strong> in each individual animal.<\/p>\n The second, published in 2018, sampled perch and roach across eight lakes and found both species in surprisingly good general health, as the assessment<\/a> of the site records.<\/p>\n But it was not a clean bill. Perch in the most contaminated water showed delayed gonad maturation<\/strong> and undeveloped phenotypes, while roach did not, as that work<\/a> set out.<\/p>\n Neither paper measured a catfish that had grown large because of radiation, because no paper has<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Part of it is the camera. A catfish filmed from a bridge, close to the lens, with nothing beside it for scale, reads as enormous on a phone screen.<\/p>\n Part of it is that the fish come to people, since visitors feed them from the same spots and the animals have learned to wait there.<\/p>\n The rest is that the real explanation is less satisfying<\/strong> than the mutation one.<\/p>\n An old fish in unfished water grows to the size its species always could, which is the same pattern seen around an offshore array<\/a> or inside a fenced solar site<\/a>.<\/p>\n What makes this pond unusual is not the wildlife in it but that the water itself is on its way out<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The catfish are living in a reservoir that is being switched off around them, one drained margin at a time, and nobody wrote a plan for that<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A shape the size of a bench turns just under the surface of the reservoir beside the Chernobyl plant. Visitors film it, and the footage travels under a caption about radiation and a mutant fish. The Chernobyl catfish is one of the most reliably wrong animal stories on the internet, and the correction is more interesting … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":31381,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"wels catfish","rank_math_title":"Pumps kept Chernobyl's cooling pond full for 13 years after the last reactor was switched off, and the biggest Chernobyl catfish ever measured there came in at 5 feet rather than the monster in the photographs","rank_math_description":"Built to cool Chernobyl's reactors, a 22-square-mile pond became a predator-free sanctuary where 200-pound wels catfish now thrive alongside 36 fish speci","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What the pond was actually built to do<\/h2>\n
The pumps ran 13 years past the last reactor<\/h2>\n
How big the fish really are<\/h2>\n
What the radiation work actually found<\/h2>\n
Why the size story keeps coming back<\/h2>\n