Vernissage Exhibition Cornelia Hesse-Honegger

Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, a science illustrator from Zurich, has been painting ?true bugs? (Heteroptera) since 1989 and since the Chernobyl accident in 1986 has collected more than 16,000 specimens in the fallout areas of Chernobyl and nuclear power plants in Europe and the US. The plates show several case studies with copies of her water colour paintings of damaged bugs, as well as geographic maps with the damage rates of the collection sites. Her studies show that nuclear plants have a severe impact on the environment. She found the highest damage rate for morphological damages of 22% in La Hague, France; the expected value is approx. 1%.