Linking bioenergetics and radiation dose in Chornobyl rodents

High metabolic rate may provide fitness benefits for individuals. But high metabolic rates incur energetic costs and the need to ingest more food, increasing the risks of ingesting harmful substances from the environment. How organisms respond to elevated ionizing radiation is an important question in the light of pollution from nuclear accidents and waste, and reliance on radiation for medical treatments. Within and around the Chornobyl exclusion zone, we investigated how the bioenergetics of wild rodents inhabiting a gradient of radioactive contamination from ‘clean’ (