Mary Mycio, author of the 2005 book “Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl,” writes that the world needs a better understanding of how the infamous plant’s radiation is still harming people, wildlife and nature.

Amid the dismal reports of worsening economies, political paralysis and social unrest (pick a country), there was a minor blip in the news last month when some scientists announced that radiation was reducing the numbers of some insects and spiders around Chornobyl (the Ukrainian language transliteration of Chernobyl).

This was news because, in the words of the New York Times: “[it] has refuted the idea that the region around the power plant, contaminated by radiation and off limits to most humans, has become a sort of post-apocalyptic Eden for deer, foxes and other mammals and birds.”

In asserting that the Chornobyl exclusion zone has been promoted as a thriving ecosystem without scientific justification, the University of Paris’s Anders Moller and the University of South Carolina’s Timothy Mousseau cited my 2005 book, “Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl,” as an example.

Indeed, the book’s premise is that the presence of humans and their activities is worse for most wildlife than the radiation from Chornobyl, and nature is thriving in the contaminated no-man’s land surrounding the defunct nuclear power station that exploded 23 years ago.

Unlike my recounting of exciting encounters with Chornobyl’s moose, wolves and deer from my travels, Moller and Mousseau actually counted the creatures they were studying and measured the radiation levels in their surroundings to conclude that there are fewer grasshoppers, spiders, dragonflies, bumble bees and butterflies in places with higher external radiation levels. Since nearly all of Chornobyl’s radiation is now in the top layers of soil, Moller and Mousseau posit that the insects’ and spiders’ close proximity to soil negatively affects their survival and reproduction.

In other research, they also found fewer forest birds and raptors in highly radioactive areas. Migratory birds and those with bright plumage seem especially vulnerable, perhaps because the chemicals needed to counter the effects of radiation are instead used to make their colorful feathers and power long-distance flight. Barn swallows, which are both migratory and colorful, suffer from abnormalities and partial albinism.

Moller and Mousseau’s research has been criticized, most notably by Ronald Chesser and Robert Baker at Texas Tech University, who say that linking decreased insect or bird populations to radiation levels requires a lot more proof than just counting butterflies and the beeps on a radiation meter.

But after reading Moller and Mousseau’s papers, I wondered if I was wrong, if the natural renewal I described was merely a temporary bloom, destined for disintegration under the decaying effects of ionizing radiation. Like chaos theory’s proverbial butterfly, whose beating wings in Bangkok can lead to a storm in Boston, could Chornobyl’s missing butterflies actually be seemingly minor factors which could, in fact, drastically change the long-term behavior of the Chornobyl ecosystem?

As with just about any science emerging from Chornobyl studies, drawing conclusions is not that simple. The only places that Moller and Mousseau did their counts in the exclusion zone were in the Red Forest, which lay in the path of the debris from the 1986 explosion, and Chornobyl itself. That seems unduly restrictive, given the zone’s nearly 3,000 square kilometers and its patchwork of radiation levels. The other counts were performed in contaminated areas (and clean areas for controls) that are populated and outside the zone in Ukraine and Belarus.

But even if it is true that some butterflies and other invertebrates are missing in highly contaminated areas, it doesn’t automatically follow that the reason lies in the negative biological effects of radiation. There can be many other explanations. Just one example: Chornobyl – both the town and the power plant – are also the focus of the most human activity in the zone: decommissioning the reactors, building waste storage facilities, constructing the new covering for the aging sarcophagus. It’s actually quite a busy place for a no-man’s land. As for the nearby Red Forest, it is sterile landscape of stunted pine trees and sand dumped there to blanket the radioactive soil. It would surprise me if there were many butterflies in such uninviting places.

Now, the polder is a far different matter. Containing a patch of very highly contaminated wetland on the left bank of the Prypyat River, directly across from the power plant, the polder was built to keep the land from spilling radionuclides into the river during spring floods. There is virtually no human activity in that lush wilderness – or in much of the left bank for that matter – where I spotted more mammals and birds in a one hour drive than I had ever seen on the right bank of the river by the power plant. If there were fewer butterflies in that little patch of radioactive Eden, the contention that radiation was more harmful to wild creatures than I had previously thought would be more convincing than missing butterflies in the Red Forest.

Unfortunately, the researchers never got to study the left bank in the zone and, at this point at least, it doesn’t appear that they will have the opportunity anytime soon.

Funding for environmental research in Chornobyl is dwindling. Caught in the vise of the worldwide global recession, the Ukrainian government doesn’t have money. And reportedly, the U.S. Department of Energy – until most recently, one of the largest donors – has decided to cut its Chornobyl research funding.

It is a shame. Chornobyl is a vast laboratory with still unrealized potential to teach us a great deal about the environmental impact of radiation, lessons that would be invaluable for public policy decisions in our world of nuclear proliferation, terrorism, failed states, global organized crime and host of other factors increasing the risk of nuclear materials getting into the wrong hand.

Perhaps funding will be restored when economies improve. Until then, the missing butterflies of Chornobyl will, in my mind, be evidence not of what we know, but of what we don’t.

Mary Mycio is the author of Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl. She lived in Ukraine from 1991 to 2007, workign as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times and as director of IREX's legal program for journalists. She is now a media law consultant based in Pennsylvania. She can be reached at myciomary@yahoo.com.