Forty years after the Chernobyl reactor exploded, gray wolves prowl a forbidden landscape denser than ever before. Their numbers have surged seven times higher than pre-1986 levels. Radiation lingers. Yet these predators thrive. Jim Smith, environmental scientist at the University of Portsmouth, has tracked the zone for over three decades. ‘Wolf populations are seven times higher than they were before the accident because there is less human pressure,’ he told Gizmodo . Elk, roe deer, rabbits—they’ve all multiplied too. Smith’s team documented this in a 2015 Current Biology study, comparing the exclusion zone to uncontaminated Belarus reserves. No hunting. No farms. No roads. Just wilderness reclaiming Soviet fields. The zone spans 4,200 square kilometers across Ukraine and Belarus. Humans fled after the April 26, 1986, meltdown at Reactor 4. Thirty died immediately. Thousands more from radiation, estimates say between 4,000 and 16,000. A concrete sarcophagus entombed the core.…