Memoirs of a Discredited Field Biologist

In the summer of 2025, I joined what was presented as a seemingly benign field trip through the post-mining landscapes of Saxony, Germany. The company was pleasant, the accommodations adequate—but I could not shake the feeling of unease brought on by the eerily haunted ecologies I encountered. Now, revisiting my field notebooks, I am overcome by a growing anxiety about the future of these altered environments. My observations—of radioactive mollusks, mutated insects, and such uncanny hybrids of nature and culture—can no longer remain confined to my notes. They demand to be written down, not only as a record of what I witnessed but as a warning. The strange developments unfolding in the Saxon terrain must be made visible—for the sake of future generations.

Bad Schlema Slug (Arion badschlemensis)

On the mining trail at Bad Schlema, I noticed a slug dragging itself across the muddy soil—likely a specimen of the Spanish slug (Arion vulgaris), an invasive species first recorded in Germany in 1969. As with other Arion slugs, its pneumostome was clearly visible, opening like a fugitive hole in the body and closing again with each breath. Yet something about it felt uncanny. The breathing rhythm, which typically follows a 10- to 60-second cycle, had accelerated to a startling three- or four-second interval. When I raised my phone to record this unsettling pace, the slug had already crossed to the far edge of the trail, where it clung to a damp stone. It was unusually energetic—its movement bore not the rhythm of a lizard, but certainly not that of any known terrestrial mollusk.

Like all slugs, the Bad Schlema Slug consists of 80 to 90 percent water, absorbing moisture directly from its surroundings through permeable skin. It would be reasonable to associate its unusually rapid physiological mechanisms with the specific qualities of the local water in Bad Schlema, which is known to contain elevated levels of radon—a radioactive gas produced by the decay of uranium. Radon-rich waters have been used therapeutically in the Schlema valley since the early twentieth century. Following the post-mining remediation of the region, a radon spa has reopened, aiming to attract health tourism to the rehabilitated landscape.

In regulated therapeutic contexts, radon concentrations in Bad Schlema spa water are permitted to reach levels as high as 1,000–3,000 Bq/L. These values far exceed what would be considered safe for regular consumption, yet are defended as beneficial under tightly controlled exposure. While promotional material at the spa claims that radon water “not only stimulates the human self-healing power, but also boosts the immune system and mobilizes hormones with pain-relieving and anti-inflammatory effects,” the hyperactivity of the Bad Schlema Slug presents a different, unintended phenomenon—an ecological consequence of a body touched by uranium’s long afterlife.

The slugs—feeding on humid mosses, fungi, and decomposing vegetation—bear witness to the ambient radon levels in a way no clinical measurement can fully capture. Nearly all water, yet not quite, they function as ecological calibrators, porous instruments of environmental testimony.

The Wismut Wasp (Polistes wismutii)

In Muldenhütten, near the ruins of the former ore refining facilities, I came across a sign scrawled in haste: “Beware of the Bees.” It stood as a rare trace of human presence in an otherwise desolate landscape of industrial decay—rusted machinery, collapsing sheds, and no sign of human life since Wismut had delivered its last load of uranium ore for processing.

Entering one of the shuttered refining halls—a shadowy ruin that seemed to echo an industrial rendering of Poe’s House of Usher—I soon realized it was not bees I should be wary of, but wasps. Inside, vast spider webs draped like veils from rusting iron girders, tethering one relic to the next. Amid this suspended world, I found the remnants of fugitive wasp nests: papery structures built not to last, but simply to serve—briefly—as vessels for metamorphosis. These were not domiciles of endurance, but of transition: constructed to molt, emerge, abandon, and vanish.

The nests formed a ruin within a ruin—structures already forsaken, yet haunted still. And as the anonymous sign outside seemed to suggest, the wasps had not gone far. They had migrated elsewhere, perhaps to another cavity in the industrial skeleton, staking ephemeral claims in the radioactive silence left behind.

I began to suspect that the human voice—issuing its warning before vanishing without trace—had encountered a particularly aggressive species now evolving in the area, one I have since named the Wismut Wasp (Polistes wismutii). These wasps construct their nests from chewed plant fibers and water. But in this uranium-saturated landscape, the materials they gather render the nests themselves faintly radioactive—biological landmines suspended in the ruins. I have no knowledge of what became of that fleeting human presence, but upon recognizing the gravity of the situation, I chose to heed the warning and retreat.

The Großräschener Alga (Chlorocrypta grossraeschenensis)

The morning after swimming in the Großräschen artificial lake—flooded decades ago to cover the remains of a former lignite mine—I noticed something unsettling happening to my skin. On my abdomen, a faint pattern that had at first resembled a mild allergic reaction had begun to expand and cohere into a shape. It no longer looked random. Rather than risk inciting panic among the group, I decided to keep the matter quiet until our final day of fieldwork, when we would visit the biology labs at the University of Freiberg. There, I hoped, I could discreetly begin to investigate the source of this phenomenon.

In the lake—where most of the group had refused to swim, citing the water’s uncanny stillness—I had secretly collected a sample of algae. Algae are known to absorb heavy metals and radioactive elements from their environment, and in post-mining or remediated landscapes, especially those with a history of uranium or lignite extraction, both water and sediment often contain trace radionuclides: uranium, radium, polonium. The algae assimilate these elements through passive uptake via their cell walls, or by binding them to extracellular polysaccharides.

While the others gathered for lunch, I slipped away to examine the sample. In the Freiberg lab, under the microscope, the algae revealed itself as something extraordinary. It formed shifting colonial structures—fine filaments and nodal clusters that mirrored the geometry of the pattern now developing on my skin. Not similar: identical. Like cellular glyphs, the formations moved in slow synchrony, pulsing with a rhythm I could not trace to any known environmental cue.

I suspect the Großräschener Alga is not merely a passive absorber of legacy contamination. It may be an active participant in the landscape’s transformation. Whether my body is resisting or adapting remains unclear. I can only hope this entry will not become posthumous. For now, I continue to document—and wait.