⁹⁰Sr in antlers and bone of a Danish roe deer population

Two sample series of roe deer antlers were included in the analyses: one from the turn of the century (three antlers), another covering the period from 1960 to 1992 (54 sets of antlers). All samples from the second sample series were taken from one-year-old animals belonging to a population of 200 animals living in a small deciduous forest, Kalø in Djursland, near Århus in Jutland. No increased ⁹⁰Sr signal was observed in the antlers after the Chernobyl accident in 1986, neither in the year of the accident nor in 1987, where possible contamination might have been expected. A possible explanation is that the concentration in the antlers is mainly affected by strontium, directly deposited on fodder plants, during the period of formation of the antlers. The ratio of the 90Sr concentration in bone/antler was 2.3 in 1989 and approximately 1 in the rest of the samples from 1990 to 1992. This may be an anomaly, but if the animals killed in 1989 had access to food sources with an increased concentration of ⁹⁰Sr, in a period which only involved bone formation, it serves as an explanation. The loss due to biogeochemical processes in the ecosystem, which is termed the ecological half-life (T 1 2eco) of radiostrontium in antlers of roe deer was determined to be 5.86 years, this value was calculated from the observed half-life, the physical half-life and the half-life of the deposition.