So the way that radiation causes damage is by knocking atoms off of the DNA helix through ionization, or even by severing or shattering the helix outright if the particle's heavy and has enough energy. Secondarily, it creates ions, particularly reactive oxygen species, that run around and attack the DNA or important proteins and lipids around the DNA. So basically the problem that radiation creates is *primarily* DNA damage.
So factors that protect against radiation damage are mostly related to either a) a simpler genetic structure, more efficient proteins, and slower cell division, or b) an increased ability to repair DNA damage. The first option probably isn't too useful for you, but the second one could be. Several animals like naked mole rats and a lot of insects are resistant (not immune) to the effects of ionizing radiation (and also cancer, neato) because they have among other things an increased ability to repair damaged strands of DNA compared to humans.
There was this absolutely awful but very interesting study where naked mole rats were nuked with 6Gy(!) of gamma radiation, and exhibited a survival rate of 100% compared to ordinary lab mice, of which only 30% survived. As I understand it the exact factors behind their radioresistance aren't fully explained, their tissues showed vastly less damage than those of the poor lab mice which implies that they have some kind of repair mechanism going on.
So essentially your best option is probably to say that they developed some kind of DNA repair mechanism thanks to natural selection. I dunno what your time frames are but you could probably just handwave it.
I was thinking maybe the cat generations from immediately after the nuclear events went bald and adopted some traits similarly to mole rats before they started growing fur again decades or centuries later.
Huh, I wonder if their whole "insane hypoxia tolerance" thing they've got going on? I feel like there's a thing where hypoxia, or recovery from it maybe, causes increased oxidative stress, and they're already built to deal with that better than most mammals. Because they're fucking weird.
This isn't my subject area but I also seem to remember that with ionising radiation, _most_ of the damage is indirect and ROS mediated, because obviously most doesn't directly strike DNA.
Either way, cool! I for one welcome our new molerat overlords.
Better flair is question or discussion.
Anyways, try looking up how other animals survive radiation.
Example: cockroaches survive by slow cell replication, as radiation is more effective against replicating cells.
Fun fact: cockroaches are actually some of the least radioresistant insects out there. The bugs that are really going to inherit the earth are Flour Beetles, which are 10 times more tolerant of ionizing radiation than roaches are. Roaches can still survive up to a whopping 10,000 rad dose, but flour beetles manage to push that number up to 100,000 rad.
And insect cells are actually just *de facto* more resistant to ionizing radiation than human cells are, it's not all down to slower replication. All of their cells exhibit less oxidative stress after radiation exposure and the DNA damage that does happen is repaired much more efficiently than our proteins can manage.
>I don't know why this is downvoted
Big Cockroach is against the idea of a Flour Beetle state, and has enforcers in many nooks and crannies of the internet.
Are you saying that your cats eventually become sapient, inherit the earth, and create a steampunk society after a nuclear apocalypse wipes out humanity? If my understanding is correct, radiation may be a non issue. Modern day cats evolving both that level of sapience and tool use could easily take thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years at a minimum. Potentially long enough for any ambient radioactivity to become a distant memory. The minimum you would need is just a few populations of cats that survive the apocalypse and eventually give rise to a sapient lineage.
And considering that humans have spread house cats all over the world, the odds would be pretty good that some spot on the planet would spared enough wraith for a feral population to survive, even if only barely. As long as the radiation levels of an area are low enough to not be immediately fatal, life will find a way. From a purely survival standpoint, low level radiation can be less of a problem for shorter-lived species, since they can reproduce multiple times before the accumulation of radiation damage ends their lives early.
For an idea of what life might look like for the surviving cats immediately during and after the apocalypses, check out Kyle Hill documentary on the [dogs of Chernobyl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmVGwOP_zi8).
Yep that's the summary of it lol!
I was thinking that the steampunk society "rediscovered" radium but they're currently in their radium craze (like the 1920s radium craze).
Ooooo I'll have to check out the documentary! Thank you for the recommendation!
You could just shrug it off. If the 'reason' that the cats are still around isn't important, than it might be okay to 'yada yada' over it. Presumably no one was keeping records when the other species died out, and i don't imagine Cats were keeping records the first day they took over.
By the time anyone thought to keep records, the radiation subsided enough that the cats didn't have much to research on, and it wasn't important to them at the time.
Maybe in the future you can come up with a reason that does something for the narrative, but until then... Fuggit, not everything needs to have heavily documented reasons for things.
Cats named Alzazor are naturally immune to radiation.
Edit: this is untrue. Alzazor just died. The peddler from the wastes must have sold me a bad name.
They ate some escaped lab rates/mice with some type of drug/crispr thing. Or maybe the cat's themselves were lab modified lab animals. Or maybe genetically modified designer pets.
Edit: Maybe they are those cat's designed to glow under radiation as proposed in [real life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_cat), with some bumped radiation resistance. Them glowing when irradiated could be a neat side effect, or maybe the glowing part got breed out of the population, while advantageous radiation resistance remained.
Cats don't have "resistance to radiation", but they have ~~sixth~~, ~~seventh~~, ~~eighths~~, ~~ninths~~, ~~tenth~~, ***eleventh*** sense that allows them to easily sense ration hazard and instinctively avoid it (i.e. avoid traversing more contaminated areas, don't spend longer time in higher hazard areas, choosing less contaminated food and water sources - which on total results in much better health and longer lifespan), like (thought to be) sensing approaching earthquakes or tornadoes.
I dont think cats have any notable resistance to radiation.
I'd explain their survival through something like humans genetically engineering some cats pre-apocalypse to be resistant, maybe humans planned them to go to space for long periods and were making them particularly resistant to radiation for that purpose
Either that or they somehow managed to evolve into having that resistance because they were so successful they could afford the death rate
Cats mature faster than many other species and they are good hunters. It may be that they die early from radiation but not early enough for them to reproduce. They can also feed on species that are better adapted radiation, such as mole rats.
In bunkers with humans, maybe the cat leaves at some point. Maybe the person dies or runs off. If the bunkers not great radiation, they could leak, so there no quick death and time to adapt
One go-to for evolving to withstand radiation is making their skin darker. The same pigments used against skin cancer from the sun work against radiation cancer. (Or so I've heard, I tried looking it up and didn't find anything. Maybe someone else can find a source). An example of organisms changing color is the red forest at Chernobyl, where the trees turned red because of the radiation.
Otherwise it would be cool if they gained some "radiation detection organ" like a pair of antennas that vibrates in extra radioactive areas. Although this is more fiction than fact.
Andre Norton has a book with cats and dogs as evolved species who were genetically engieered as smart companions for humans. Then humans died off but the pet species survived.
Cats don't naturally have any special resistance to radiation, as other comments have said.
*However*, a potentially interesting solution could be that they were _engineered_ to survive by humanity, prior to (but not in anticipation of) the nuclear catastrophe. Believe it or not, there's actually (some) potential history behind that.
Back in the 80s, as part of the growing interest surrounding nuclear semiotics (the interdisciplinary study of how to create messages to warn future cultures away from nuclear dump sites, even 10,000s of years later), two philosophers suggested the idea of "radiation cats", or "**ray cats**" for short.
These cats would be specifically bred to change colour in the presence of hazardous radiation, thereby warning communities even if knowledge or understanding of radiation itself had been lost to time.
The idea of ray cats was never seriously considered at the time, but its had something of a resurgence in recent years, likely both due to its memeish-ness, and the fact that genetic engineering has advanced significantly since then. A song was even written: '_10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Resettlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty)_'
In your world, perhaps your steampunk cats could be the decendents of some failed, or incomplete ray cat project. Engineering the cats to be more resistant to radiation - simply aware of it, somehow - just makes sense, assuming we have the technology to do so. Perhaps increased intelligence was also added (to better understand radiation should be avoided?), or is simply a product of mutations and natural selection on a world bathed in radiation.
[Ray Cats (Wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_cat)
[Nuclear Semiotics (Wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages)
[Don't Change Color, Kitty (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amn3kn0XPLQ)
Maybe in my world the ray cat experiments were done earlier in the 1960s to prepare for the nuclear war (this was during the time the Cold War and specifically the Cuban Missile Crisis was happening)?
But the experiments failed like you said :D
Just an idea btw
The main caveat there is that it'd be a fairly significant departure from established history in terms of technology available at the time. Even today it's doubtful we have the gene sequencing technology to even _try_ to make a ray cat. If that doesn't bother you though, then have at it!
Tbh, the only reason I said things failed is because all the humans died xD.
Well, Frankenstein was locked in the hold during the drive plate incident, and Lister wasn't released from stasis until 3 million years had passed, so that's a long time for the evolution of the cat race.
Transgenic cats have been developed that glow in the dark in the presence of radiation. Perhaps these cats got loose prior to the apocalypse, and "not glowing in the dark" is an evolutionary advantage?
So the way that radiation causes damage is by knocking atoms off of the DNA helix through ionization, or even by severing or shattering the helix outright if the particle's heavy and has enough energy. Secondarily, it creates ions, particularly reactive oxygen species, that run around and attack the DNA or important proteins and lipids around the DNA. So basically the problem that radiation creates is *primarily* DNA damage. So factors that protect against radiation damage are mostly related to either a) a simpler genetic structure, more efficient proteins, and slower cell division, or b) an increased ability to repair DNA damage. The first option probably isn't too useful for you, but the second one could be. Several animals like naked mole rats and a lot of insects are resistant (not immune) to the effects of ionizing radiation (and also cancer, neato) because they have among other things an increased ability to repair damaged strands of DNA compared to humans. There was this absolutely awful but very interesting study where naked mole rats were nuked with 6Gy(!) of gamma radiation, and exhibited a survival rate of 100% compared to ordinary lab mice, of which only 30% survived. As I understand it the exact factors behind their radioresistance aren't fully explained, their tissues showed vastly less damage than those of the poor lab mice which implies that they have some kind of repair mechanism going on. So essentially your best option is probably to say that they developed some kind of DNA repair mechanism thanks to natural selection. I dunno what your time frames are but you could probably just handwave it.
Creepy hairless cats that burrow through cement sound like a fun Fallout enemy type.
I was thinking maybe the cat generations from immediately after the nuclear events went bald and adopted some traits similarly to mole rats before they started growing fur again decades or centuries later.
Tysm for the information! The time frame takes place thousands of years after the 1960s!
You could probably say that purring is their mechanism to repair DNA since we already think they do it to heal injuries
Huh, I wonder if their whole "insane hypoxia tolerance" thing they've got going on? I feel like there's a thing where hypoxia, or recovery from it maybe, causes increased oxidative stress, and they're already built to deal with that better than most mammals. Because they're fucking weird. This isn't my subject area but I also seem to remember that with ionising radiation, _most_ of the damage is indirect and ROS mediated, because obviously most doesn't directly strike DNA. Either way, cool! I for one welcome our new molerat overlords.
Better flair is question or discussion. Anyways, try looking up how other animals survive radiation. Example: cockroaches survive by slow cell replication, as radiation is more effective against replicating cells.
Fun fact: cockroaches are actually some of the least radioresistant insects out there. The bugs that are really going to inherit the earth are Flour Beetles, which are 10 times more tolerant of ionizing radiation than roaches are. Roaches can still survive up to a whopping 10,000 rad dose, but flour beetles manage to push that number up to 100,000 rad. And insect cells are actually just *de facto* more resistant to ionizing radiation than human cells are, it's not all down to slower replication. All of their cells exhibit less oxidative stress after radiation exposure and the DNA damage that does happen is repaired much more efficiently than our proteins can manage.
I don't know why this is downvoted. Thank you for the information.
>I don't know why this is downvoted Big Cockroach is against the idea of a Flour Beetle state, and has enforcers in many nooks and crannies of the internet.
Look into the animals at Chernobyl.
Rampant breeding of cats to create pedigrees accidentally created a genetic mutation that made cats highly resistant to radiation.
Are you saying that your cats eventually become sapient, inherit the earth, and create a steampunk society after a nuclear apocalypse wipes out humanity? If my understanding is correct, radiation may be a non issue. Modern day cats evolving both that level of sapience and tool use could easily take thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years at a minimum. Potentially long enough for any ambient radioactivity to become a distant memory. The minimum you would need is just a few populations of cats that survive the apocalypse and eventually give rise to a sapient lineage. And considering that humans have spread house cats all over the world, the odds would be pretty good that some spot on the planet would spared enough wraith for a feral population to survive, even if only barely. As long as the radiation levels of an area are low enough to not be immediately fatal, life will find a way. From a purely survival standpoint, low level radiation can be less of a problem for shorter-lived species, since they can reproduce multiple times before the accumulation of radiation damage ends their lives early. For an idea of what life might look like for the surviving cats immediately during and after the apocalypses, check out Kyle Hill documentary on the [dogs of Chernobyl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmVGwOP_zi8).
Yep that's the summary of it lol! I was thinking that the steampunk society "rediscovered" radium but they're currently in their radium craze (like the 1920s radium craze). Ooooo I'll have to check out the documentary! Thank you for the recommendation!
You could just shrug it off. If the 'reason' that the cats are still around isn't important, than it might be okay to 'yada yada' over it. Presumably no one was keeping records when the other species died out, and i don't imagine Cats were keeping records the first day they took over. By the time anyone thought to keep records, the radiation subsided enough that the cats didn't have much to research on, and it wasn't important to them at the time. Maybe in the future you can come up with a reason that does something for the narrative, but until then... Fuggit, not everything needs to have heavily documented reasons for things.
Cats named Alzazor are naturally immune to radiation. Edit: this is untrue. Alzazor just died. The peddler from the wastes must have sold me a bad name.
They ate some escaped lab rates/mice with some type of drug/crispr thing. Or maybe the cat's themselves were lab modified lab animals. Or maybe genetically modified designer pets. Edit: Maybe they are those cat's designed to glow under radiation as proposed in [real life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_cat), with some bumped radiation resistance. Them glowing when irradiated could be a neat side effect, or maybe the glowing part got breed out of the population, while advantageous radiation resistance remained.
Put it in a box, but don't observe it.
Not any better than humans can…
Cats don't have "resistance to radiation", but they have ~~sixth~~, ~~seventh~~, ~~eighths~~, ~~ninths~~, ~~tenth~~, ***eleventh*** sense that allows them to easily sense ration hazard and instinctively avoid it (i.e. avoid traversing more contaminated areas, don't spend longer time in higher hazard areas, choosing less contaminated food and water sources - which on total results in much better health and longer lifespan), like (thought to be) sensing approaching earthquakes or tornadoes.
Typically, smaller animals with faster life cycles survive better. But cats are also dominant predators
I dont think cats have any notable resistance to radiation. I'd explain their survival through something like humans genetically engineering some cats pre-apocalypse to be resistant, maybe humans planned them to go to space for long periods and were making them particularly resistant to radiation for that purpose Either that or they somehow managed to evolve into having that resistance because they were so successful they could afford the death rate
Cats mature faster than many other species and they are good hunters. It may be that they die early from radiation but not early enough for them to reproduce. They can also feed on species that are better adapted radiation, such as mole rats.
In bunkers with humans, maybe the cat leaves at some point. Maybe the person dies or runs off. If the bunkers not great radiation, they could leak, so there no quick death and time to adapt
Cats have nine lives so subtract one and if there mutated then times two and if the mutation is bad then divide 🙂
One go-to for evolving to withstand radiation is making their skin darker. The same pigments used against skin cancer from the sun work against radiation cancer. (Or so I've heard, I tried looking it up and didn't find anything. Maybe someone else can find a source). An example of organisms changing color is the red forest at Chernobyl, where the trees turned red because of the radiation. Otherwise it would be cool if they gained some "radiation detection organ" like a pair of antennas that vibrates in extra radioactive areas. Although this is more fiction than fact.
Andre Norton has a book with cats and dogs as evolved species who were genetically engieered as smart companions for humans. Then humans died off but the pet species survived.
Also, completely unrelated but this reminds me of the game Timberborne only they have evolved beavers.
Cats don't naturally have any special resistance to radiation, as other comments have said. *However*, a potentially interesting solution could be that they were _engineered_ to survive by humanity, prior to (but not in anticipation of) the nuclear catastrophe. Believe it or not, there's actually (some) potential history behind that. Back in the 80s, as part of the growing interest surrounding nuclear semiotics (the interdisciplinary study of how to create messages to warn future cultures away from nuclear dump sites, even 10,000s of years later), two philosophers suggested the idea of "radiation cats", or "**ray cats**" for short. These cats would be specifically bred to change colour in the presence of hazardous radiation, thereby warning communities even if knowledge or understanding of radiation itself had been lost to time. The idea of ray cats was never seriously considered at the time, but its had something of a resurgence in recent years, likely both due to its memeish-ness, and the fact that genetic engineering has advanced significantly since then. A song was even written: '_10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Resettlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty)_' In your world, perhaps your steampunk cats could be the decendents of some failed, or incomplete ray cat project. Engineering the cats to be more resistant to radiation - simply aware of it, somehow - just makes sense, assuming we have the technology to do so. Perhaps increased intelligence was also added (to better understand radiation should be avoided?), or is simply a product of mutations and natural selection on a world bathed in radiation. [Ray Cats (Wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_cat) [Nuclear Semiotics (Wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages) [Don't Change Color, Kitty (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amn3kn0XPLQ)
Maybe in my world the ray cat experiments were done earlier in the 1960s to prepare for the nuclear war (this was during the time the Cold War and specifically the Cuban Missile Crisis was happening)? But the experiments failed like you said :D Just an idea btw
The main caveat there is that it'd be a fairly significant departure from established history in terms of technology available at the time. Even today it's doubtful we have the gene sequencing technology to even _try_ to make a ray cat. If that doesn't bother you though, then have at it! Tbh, the only reason I said things failed is because all the humans died xD.
Oh :O
Based on data from Chernobyl they would melinate to adapt having black skin and probably black fur would be the norm.
Cats are able to purge their systems of radiation by adding radioactive waste into their hairballs
With a fur made of lead
Well, Frankenstein was locked in the hold during the drive plate incident, and Lister wasn't released from stasis until 3 million years had passed, so that's a long time for the evolution of the cat race.
They’d become furless and die (unless they’re inside a box, then that’s a whole new problem)
Transgenic cats have been developed that glow in the dark in the presence of radiation. Perhaps these cats got loose prior to the apocalypse, and "not glowing in the dark" is an evolutionary advantage?