Study reveals how animals recover from nuclear annihilation

Science : The nuclear weapons tests that the French government carried out over the Polynesian atoll of Fangataufa in the late 1960s and early 1970s were so potent that most of the atoll’s terrestrial and aquatic life was wiped out. How life—in particular aquatic mollusks—returned to the atoll is the subject of a 30-year field study that has just been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B . The study’s authors, Pierre Legendre and Bernard Salvat of the University of Montreal, divided up the atoll’s reefs and shores into 6-square-meter segments and periodically counted the mollusk species. On all reefs, the mix of species before the tests was very different from what arose afterward. Carnivorous mollusks, for example, gained in number. The study’s significance to evolution is unclear. Mollusks reproduce by dispersing larvae into the sea. The species that ended up on Fangataufa after the tests could have been carried there by chance currents.