I was reading the following article today:

http://www.bbc.com/travel/feature/20110228-a-day-trip-to-chernobyl

It is about tourist trips to Chernobyl in Russia (site of nuclear accident).

The article says:

"However, recent studies suggest that the radiation has caused a decline in biodiversity and had long-term health effects on animals in the zone. Visitors to the plant's cooling pond can feed the massive catfish that have thrived there."

Anyone up for a road trip :-)

Neil

I would only go if those catfish were like 500lbs each. Like the Mekong River Catfish! Hehehehe!!!

very cool article

I was in Ukraine in early spring in 2004. But the International airport in Borispol is in a southeast outer suburb of Kiev. And we headed out east To Lugansk, which is some 12 to 14 hours away by car. The river comes down from Chernobyl into Kiev. So we did not head up to the hot zone. You have to wonder just how far the radiation affected & will still affect.

Several interesting other items are that they would not let me eat mushrooms raw (sliced or chopped) for a salad. Only cooked. It seems mushrooms absorb & retain radioactivity. Did you know the Ukrainian word Chernobyl means (or translates to) "Wormwood" in English, named for the bitter weed that grows there? Refer to Revelation 8:10-11 as per Wormwood. Interesting in comparison to the nuclear incident. And after the explosions started, a high number of UFOs were reported over & around the nuclear plant.

Now we can add a little more spice with the overgrown catfish.

Oh yeah, the catfish there are called sheatfish. They look like a YellowCat head & body up to the high fin, then the rest of the body is slender & longer, resembling an eel down to its tail end. I was going to fry some up for them there, but the market we were at, did not have any that day. Not sure how high the cost would have been. Found the only package of yellow corn meal they had. They had to come & dig thru the pile for it. Instead, we had to get Pellingot (which when whole, looks like a mullet, but lots of crossbones). So I wound up having to fry it with bones, instead of boneless. Regardless, it came out good fried. I was asked for the recipe, as they had never had it that way before.