There may be a surprising reason behind the mysterious blue dogs that were recently spotted roaming the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
Photos taken earlier this year showed several dogs with bright blue fur wandering the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine, fueling widespread speculation online, including theories of radiation exposure and mutations.
However, a scientific advisor for the organization that cares for the strays says those ideas could not "be further from the truth."
"The blue dye likely came from a tipped over port-a-potty where the dogs were rolling around in the poop, as dogs are prone to do," Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina was quoted saying on the Dogs of Chernobyl Facebook account.
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Mousseau noted this behavior is similar to how some dogs are drawn to cat litter boxes.
"The blue coloration was simply a sign of the dog's unsanitary behavior!" Mousseau said. "As any dog owner knows, most dogs will eat just about anything, including feces!"
Despite the social media speculation, the dogs' blue fur does "not reflect any kind of mutation or evolutionary adaptation to radiation," he added.
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Dogs of Chernobyl, the program that cares for the roughly 700 dogs in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and is affiliated with the nonprofit Clean Futures Fund (CFF), first shared images of the blue-tinted dogs in October.
At the time, the group had been unable to capture the animals to determine the source of their unusual coloring.
"We are on the ground catching dogs for sterilization, and we came across three dogs that were completely blue," Dogs of Chernobyl posted to Instagram. "We are not sure exactly what is going [on]. … We do not know the reason, and we are attempting to catch them so we can find out what is happening."
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Many dogs were left behind following the Chernobyl nuclear plant explosion, when more than 120,000 evacuees were told to leave immediately, according to CFF.
"The evacuees were not allowed to bring anything that they could not carry, and their pets had to be left behind," the CFF website notes. "They were told they would return in 3 days, but they were never allowed to return. Their pets became abandoned."
Timothy Mousseau did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
