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The radiation in the air due to the Fukushima meltdown does not seem to have been high enough to effect human beings. But there is one species it has devastated: butterflies. Exposure to radioactive material released into the environment has caused mutations in butterflies found in Japan.

Two workers at the reactor were killed by the 50-foot-high tsunami, but the fear that the victims of the radiation that spewed from it would number in the thousands never materialized. In fact, the "hot spots" in Japan showed radiation at the level of .1 rem, a number that’s small compared with the radiation that people in Denver live with every day (a rem is the unit of measurement used to gauge radiation damage to human tissue).
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In summer, people in certain parts of the Midwest expect to see Monarch butterflies, but they’re becoming scarce. Experts think that this is because farm fields are now planted with genetically-modified corn and soybeans that are resistant to the herbicide Roundup, so farmers to spray the chemical over the entire crop in order to eradicate weeds. But when they do this, they also kill off the milkweed, which is the butterflies’ favorite food.
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As long as there have been humans, we have gazed at beautiful butterflies, but climate change may alter all that. Rising carbon dioxide levels associated with global warming may affect interactions between plants and the insects that eat them, altering the course of plant evolution. This is particularly true of milkweed, the food that the caterpillars that turn into beautiful Monarch butterflies eat.read more

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Just like frogs, butterflies produce their own medicine, and they dose themselves with it while they are still caterpillars. This is why Monarch butterflies lay their eggs on milkweed plants, which contain high levels of chemicals that are toxic to predators (but don’t hurt the caterpillars, which also feed on milkweed). In LiveScience.com, Andrea Leontiou quotes researcher Jaap De Roode as saying, "You look at these creatures that we think are very simple, and they can do this fantastic thing. They look at nature as a medicine cabinet.read more