At the end of August 2020, people in Farragut, Tennessee, saw a white-tailed deer walking and stumbling on the side of the road, and also tripped by obvious obstacles, so they went forward to check it out, only to see a frightening scene, the deer's two eyeballs were covered with hair, and the pupils were covered without safety, leaving only the surrounding whites!
Seeing this scene, these people were so surprised that they could not speak, and after the local news reports, it caused some people to panic, because the Wattsba Nuclear Power Plant in Tennessee was also less than 60 kilometers away from Farragut in a straight line.
Straight-line distance between the Vatsba nuclear power plant and Farragut
A white-tailed deer with long hairs on its eyeballs
Tennessee Wildlife Resources Department staff received multiple phone calls related to the incident, including eyewitness descriptions and photo and video messages, the deer could not see something, hit the body of multiple bleeding, and the two eyeballs were originally in the position of the black eye kernel, that is, a handful of hair, and the other parts of the body hair is no different.
Sterling Daniels, a wildlife biologist at TWRA, asked local police and animal control personnel to keep the deer's head for study, and according to experts, the deer's vision is only able to distinguish between day and night, which is no longer possible to see clearly.
The Southeast Cooperative Wildlife Diseases Research Group (SCWDS) of the University of Georgia Veterinary School took the deer's head and conducted a CWD test, which found that the deer was positive for THD (epidemic bleeding disease), explaining some of the deer's abnormal behavior, but could not explain why the deer had hair on its eyes, was it really caused by a nuclear leak?
watts bar nuclear plant
People need answers, otherwise the panic will continue, after all, during the epidemic, any disturbance can become a catastrophe, and experts must answer this question carefully.
Why do white-tailed deer grow hair on their eyeballs?
The experts carefully examined the deer's eyeballs and found that the hair protruded from the meat plate and covered the deer's cornea - covering the transparent part of the iris and pupil, which was originally a transparent cornea, but now it is a layer of tissue similar to deerskin, and microscopic examination by SCWDS determines that the hair growth is "corneal skin-like".
Dr. Nicole Nemeth and research technician Michelle Willis this is a chorioma, defined as abnormal parts of the normal tissue that grows out of the body, such as hair on the body is normal, but this deer grows on the cornea of the eyeball, and this corneal dermatitis is no different from normal skin, such as hair follicles, sweat glands, collagen and fat and other structures!
Although the tumor is benign and not fatal, the deer's eyes are invisible, and as a wild animal that needs vision to escape predators and avoid danger and find hay, it is undoubtedly a disaster, Dr. Nicole Nemeth believes that the deer's corneal skin sample should be congenital, most likely due to embryonic development defects, but living for so long (about 1.5 years) is simply a miracle. And this hair grows on the most sensitive eyeballs, not knowing how painful it is.
In earlier reports, Tennessee also found another case of corneal skin, but the deer was luckier, only one eye was abnormal, the other eye still maintained normal vision, at least alive is no problem, dodging predators and escaping, it can only depend on luck!
Is it related to nuclear leakage?
This question is really difficult to answer, theoretically, the corneal skin sample is a developmental defect, which is related to the mutation of DNA itself, or the abnormal division during the development of the fertilized egg, but because the reasons for these mutations are diverse, such as mutations that may be induced by the outside world, nuclear radiation, cosmic rays are possible, or it may only be the dominant expression of recessive inheritance, or other reasons, so it is difficult to find out what the cause is when there are only one or two cases.
Wildlife mutations are also occurring around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, but only the case of long hair on the eyes has never been found, usually vegetation and hair abnormalities, such as the discovery of various tumors in wolves around Chernobyl, the increase in white spots in the hair of cattle around the Fukushima nuclear power plant and the mutation of blue butterflies.
So there is only no correlation between the two, from the perspective of experts, there is no direct connection, but from the probability analysis can not be 100% excluded, so this kind of question will not have an answer.