Chernobyl catfish are really fucking cool.
Many of them are upwards of 9 ft long!
This is not because of mutations due to radiation!
This is because of the fact that humans went bye-bye and yeeted out of the immediate vicinity.
Catfish never stop growing. Ever.
When humans stop actively killing catfish, the population is allowed to age as they just don’t? stop? and they get really fucking massive
They are so fucking radioactive.
To reiterate, these catfish are old fuckers. That’s very important.
Also, some of the catfish, at least the Bad Bone Boys™️ live in a pond by the reactors (I believe it’s actually a separate system connected to the reactors for extra cooling water. Don’t quote me on that specific fact though)
Near the reactors? Why Ace, that’s where the super deadly radiation comes from!
So much radiation! And the radiation builds up in the body of the catfish, especially iodine, as they eat and the radioactive isotopes of iodine release radiation into the catfish’s body where it stays! And it doesn’t leave! Ever!
And what’s even wackier is that, again, isolating the catfish in the pond from the catfish in the Exclusion Zone because they have no predators, they get super big and super old and won’t stop and won’t die. Catfish are just like that.
This leads to weird thoughts/theories like: infinite catfish in the wild? Obviously not possible, because of disease and natural cellular mutation (accelerated by radiation in the Chernobyl case. Sorry my dudes, no infinite Big Bad Boned Catfish for y’all!)
Feel free to ask further questions! I can probably also recommend good academic papers and books (and if I can find the socumentary where someone points a Geiger counter at a catfish skeleton, and promptly screams in terror at the alarmingly high reading I can recommend that too) on the topic of both Chernobyl catfish and Chernobyl in general!