Researchers in Japan have concluded that exposure to radioactive material released into the environment near Fukushima has caused mutations in butterflies.

According to a report published in Scientific Reports, scientists found an increase in leg, antennae and wing shape mutations among butterflies collected following the 2011 Fukushima accident.

Two months after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident in March 2011, a team of Japanese researchers collected 144 adult butterflies from 10 locations in Japan, including the Fukushima area. When the accident occurred, the adult butterflies would have been overwintering as larvae.

By comparing mutations found on the butterflies collected from the different sites, the team found that areas with greater amounts of radiation in the environment were home to butterflies with much smaller wings and irregularly developed eyes.

The team then bred these butterflies within labs 1,750km away from the accident, where artificial radiation could hardly be detected. It was by breeding these butterflies that they began noticing a suite of abnormalities that hadn’t been seen in the previous generation such as malformed antennae. Six months later, they again collected adults from the 10 sites and found that butterflies from the Fukushima area showed a mutation rate more than double that of those found sooner after the accident.

We have seen what radiation can do to people. There are servicemen in the US and UK that were exposed to nuclear test explosions at Bikini Atoll and in the Egyptian desert. Both the Brits and the US veterans suffered from many ailments as they got older, including various forms of cancers – in themselves, mutations.

We also saw what happened to those who survived the initial blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. We also still live with the legacy of the Chernobyl disaster. Children have been born with birth defects and there are very high cancer rates in the region. When Chernobyl first blew, the powers that be downplayed the danger the world over. The reality is that we are still dealing with the fallout – cattle and other animals are still eating grass that grows in soil which is still contaminated. In fact, the scientists analysing the butterflies concluded that this higher rate of mutation came from eating contaminated food, but also from mutations of the parents’ genetic material that was passed on to the next generation

The findings show that the particles released from the Fukushima accident had led to novel, severely abnormal, development, and that the mutations to the butterflies’ genetic material was still affecting the insects, even after the residual radiation in the environment had decayed away.

It therefore begs the questions: Was the fallout downplayed? And perhaps most importantly, what effects did the Fukushima disaster have on the human species? We understand so much, yet we also understand so little. This is what we call progress.