Katastrophe Tschernobyl

Field studies in the nuclear fallout areas from Chernobyl

As a scientific illustrator I had worked for Prof. Hans Burla, a geneticist at the Zoological Institute of the University of Zurich. In 1967 he gave me the assignment to draw Drosophila subobscura flies that had been mutated in the laboratory by adding a poison (EMS) to their food. For my own interest I also painted these mutated flies, which were called quasimodo.
In 1985 I painted a housefly, Musca domestica, mutation called aristapedia — mutated by x-rays in the laboratory. The dean of the Zoological Institute gave the mutant flies to me when I asked him for permission to paint them. This work trained me to detect morphological disturbances in Heteroptera true bugs, which live in the wild at the edge of forests and in meadows.