Some suggested that perhaps her field samplings were statistically insignificant exceptions to the norm, simply the result of natural mutation or injury. Of course, she had no way of knowing whether the abnormalities she saw were from mutations, or whether any possible mutations were caused by the radiation. Out of the 55 true bugs she collected, 12 were malformed. In 1990, she traveled to Chernobyl itself, collecting insects from within the exclusion area around the sarcophagus of the nuclear reactor. Enough time hadn’t passed for scientists to understand Chernobyl’s impact on biological communities, and many thought the effects on animals and insects would probably be minor. Most research was focused on the health risks to humans and engineering issues. When Hesse-Honegger’s images were first published in the late 1980s, though, they generated uproar and criticism in the scientific community. And when she looked, collecting 50 to 500 insects at various locations, she did find insects with slight abnormalities in their anatomy.

“All living beings in areas contaminated by the radioactive cloud were now in a situation comparable to that of laboratory flies exposed to radioactivity,” she says. Knowing that severe radiation exposure can cause mutations in the string of DNA letters found within cells, and that those mutations might cause deformities in a creature’s body plan, Hesse-Honegger went looking for her preferred bugs in regions under the Chernobyl cloud, first in Sweden and then in southern Switzerland. But, perhaps her most famous work comes from areas affected by the explosion at a nuclear power station in Chernobyl, Ukraine, on April 26, 1986. She got her start working is an illustrator at an entomology lab at the University of Zurich in the 1960s, where she drew flies and other insects that had been exposed to different mutagens, such as x-rays and ethyl methanesulfonate (a compound similar to Agent Orange). Her bright paintings of “ true bugs”-insects like firebugs, aphids and cicadas that all share a unique sucking mouth organ-often focus on their anatomy, and look like something out of a beautiful old-school entomology textbook. “The closer you look the more you see.”Ī Zurich-based artist and scientific illustrator, Hesse-Honegger has been peering into microscopes and drawing malformed insects for decades. “Each one is a little bit like a puzzle,” says Tim Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina. There’s a bent antennae or a crumpled wing-the deformities make it clear to the viewer that this bug is not “normal.” If you stare at one of Cornelia Hesse-Honegger’s watercolors long enough, you’ll notice something’s a little bit off with the insects she depicts.

Art predicting chernobyl aftermath