April 7, 2016 • 50 mins
The human obsession with vampires runs deep, so deep that it survives our consistent attempts to squeeze all the mystery and fun out of the topic. Inject a little science, however, and the patient returns once more to a state of fabulous un-life. Join Robert and Christian as they explore the fluid dynamics of blood drinking, the mathematics of pandemic vampirism and the evolution of real-world blood drinkers.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from housetop work
dot com. Modern science has not only shown us how
fragile human life is, but even the entire planet, or
the entire universe as we know it, is on the
(00:24):
edge of extinction. Perhaps only the already dead, the zombies,
and the vampires, will have the strength to survive the
apocalyptic disasters so often predicted these days, involving exploding sun spots,
gigantic volcanoes, meteor attacks, and rampaging epidemics that can wipe
out whole populations in an instant. Hey, welcome to Stuff
(00:49):
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Christian Sager, and we just began the show with
a quote from Mary Halab from her article Vampires and
Medical Science that is printed in the February two fifteen
issue of the Journal of Popular Culture. Why, because we're
going to talk about the physics and mathematics of vampire
(01:10):
blood sucking today. Yeah. Now, if you're a long time
listening to Stuff to Blow your Mind, uh, and you
visit our website, perhaps you're familiar with the Monster Science
the video series. You know from all these avenues that
we've we've touched on vampires before in the past. Uh,
this time, we're we're largely going to deal with you know,
a little a little physics, a little um fluid mechanics,
(01:33):
a little mathematics, as well as just taking you through
the the evolution of natural world vampires as well. Uh.
But yeah, certainly we love vampires. Here's stuff to blow
your mind. I think as as uh you know, as
a people humans uh cannot get over the Yeah, as
(01:55):
you know, we are fans of and did an episode
on the Strange, that's right. Uh, and it was interesting.
There was stuff in the research for today's episode that
brought up the strain for me that I didn't find
when we were doing research on the strain um, like
in particular different kinds of tongues and bats and how
they consumed blood. Yeah. I mean, we could really just
(02:15):
do vampire episode after vampire episode and find just probably
a whole podcast out there vampires. I mean, and even
when you're getta do this, our fascination with it, just
the mythological appeal of vampires, you know, despite our best
efforts to just totally kill it with with with a
steak in the party, with a steak in the heart,
(02:36):
especially a cinematic steak in the heart. Through some of
just the sort of trite rehashes that we see over
and over again, we still can't get enough. There's still
something just hideously romantic about the vampire. Oh yeah, I'm
always on the lookout for a good new vampire movie. Um.
And I think the last one that I saw, did
(02:57):
you see Byzantium? I did not think. I have it
in my cute. It's an interesting movie. It's not it's
not like mind blowing or anything like that, but it was.
It was a nice take on the vampire mythos um. Well, like,
I love how the Strain has done and we talked
about this in the Strain episode, how they've like really
taken into account like anatomical differences in nature incorporate and
(03:19):
incorporated that into their vampire mythos um. But yeah, I
just as a horror fan, or maybe just as a
cinema fan, I'm always waiting for somebody to find like
the next cool hook on it. You know. I'm like,
I'm thinking of Near Dark a lot of fun. Yeah. Um,
Bill Paxton roll on that, yeah, Lance Hendrickson too, pretty
(03:41):
much everybody from Aliens, Yeah, yeah, it was a Katherine
Bigelow film. It was. Yeah. Now, for the purposes of
this episode again, we're gonna we're going to limit our
discussion of vampires to physics, mathematics, and evolution, um, you know,
basic real world biology without getting very you know, without
doing too much the way of dragging in anymore folklore, mythology,
(04:03):
film history, etcetera. And really the best place to start,
in my opinion is um is by looking at bats.
I mean, bats are pretty much the vampire bat is
one of our most prevalent modern examples. Uh. The the
main parallel between the idea of a blood drinking human
uh in fiction is a real life blood drinking um vertebrate.
(04:28):
You know. It's interesting about that that I learned doing
research for this episode was I had always assumed that
we called them. Sorry, I had always assumed that the
vampire myth came out of people having witnessed vampire bats.
I did not realize that it was sort of like
the hydra that we've talked about recently, that it was
(04:49):
actually the myth that came first, and then when we
discovered vampire bats, we gave them the name. Yeah, that's right,
because these areas where you many of the areas in
the world where you had the vampire mythology that you
didn't actually have any blood drinking bats. There are million
South America and and part of that has to do
I mean, most of it has to do with some
(05:10):
of the limitations of blood drinking. So let's talk about
the bats and the birds. They have a great deal
in common. They're very different organisms. And the birds we
have the avians that emerged about a hundred and fifty
million years ago in the Jurassic Period. They went out
to fly, swim, trot, burrow all over the world. Meanwhile,
mammalian bats date back between seventy five and a hundred
(05:31):
million years and uh, it's harder to say because um quote,
bats are one of the most diverse groups of mammals today,
they are one of the least common groups in the
fossil record. Bats have small light skeletons that do not
preserve well, and we have very little information on the
early evolution of the group. And that's from a University
(05:52):
of Edinburgh page that I'll link to in the landing
page for this episode that deals with just sort of
the basic evolution of bats. Have you ever been to
or heard of the bridge that's in Austin, Texas that
just has like millions of bats underneath it and if
you like hang out there at the right time of night,
you can just see them all swarming out. I've seen
video of it. I went to Austin on vacation two
(06:13):
years ago and it was awesome, Like we got to
see it and it was really, uh, really something to behold.
But also apparently are co workers who were in Austin
recently for south By Southwest. We're gonna try to do
a video on it, but the bats wouldn't come out.
They were not cooperative. Um, so both bats and birds
learned to fly in their own ways. Uh. And there
(06:34):
are there are other fascinating examples of their conversion evolution. Uh.
Several dozen bats species and more than three hundred species
of hummingbirds evolved to resemble each other anatomically and behaviorally
solely because they existed in similar environments and exploited a
similar resource, that being nectar. Yeah, so nectar feeding bats
(06:56):
they have pretty strange anatomies as well. Like I think
we hyper focus on the vampire bats, but really I
think it's something like three out of like a thousand
and one hundred bats species drink blood, so it's kind
of interesting that we focus so much on that. But
so these nectar feeding bats, there's one called the orange
(07:17):
nectar feeding back, or it's a Latin name is Lancophilia Robustah.
It can extend its tongue out to drink the nectar,
and it has grooves on its tongue that undulate like waves,
forming a conveyor belt to just basically conveyor belts drag
the nectar up to it. It's a it's gullet. And
(07:38):
the way, the reason why is that these bats way
fifteen grams each. They have to drink one point five
times their own weight every single night. So that means
that each one of these bats has to visit somewhere
between eight hundred and a thousand flowers every night in
order to survive. Um. So it has to be really quick.
That's why it's evolved this crazy tongue. It only has
(07:59):
two second visit, so it's just like boom, flies into
the flower, sucks out the nectar with its crazy tongue,
and flies away. Now imagine something like this with somebody
who drinks blood, right, um, And in fact there's also
a bat in South America that has a tongue like
the vampires in the strain that we had talked about.
Its tongue is one point five times the length of
(08:20):
the rest of its body, and it reaches all the
way down its throat between its sternam and its heart.
So it's just this huge organ that's shooting up out
of its body through its mouth, grabbing this is a nectar,
drinking one again, grabbing the nectar and the yankee back down. Um.
But those are nectivores, right, and we're here to talk
(08:41):
about san guivores. Yes, sanguavar is the blood drinkers. And
there's little or no convergence between birds and bats when
it comes to drinking blood. And now there are birds
that occasionally or even frequently feed on on blood. Um.
Vampire finches of the Glastical Sylands occasionally feed by drinking
of the blood of other birds. Meanwhile, you have, you know,
(09:02):
plenty of examples of birds that feed on ticks and
other ectoparasites on large animals, and they sometimes cross that
line between dining on stolen blood and stealing it for themselves.
But none of these birds is an obligate cyclevore an
obligate blood drinker. The vampire bat stands alone among all vertebrates,
is the only aerial or terrestrial obligate blood drinker. It's
(09:25):
all they consume aside from their mother's milk. And so,
to give you a comparison to those nectar drinking bats
that I was talking about earlier, blood is actually pretty
skimpy when it comes to protein and fat. The kind
of energy they need water, so vampire bats get almost
no fat at all out of it. Subsequently, they have
to consume this is different from the nectar ones. They
(09:47):
only have to consume half their weight in blood each
night to stay alive. Imagine if you and I had
to do that, if we had to consume half our
way in blood, Like that's even uh fantastic by the
imagination of vampires, right, Like, that's a lot of blood.
And we're gonna get to that later on when we
talk about the physics of actually drinking blood from a
thrall if you're a vampire. Yeah, I think that's certainly,
(10:10):
certainly something that's very important to keep in mind here though,
is that that blood is not this just font of
energy and resources. Uh, there's there's very little power in
the blood and for a vampire bat and certainly if
you're gonna extrapolate that and say a vampiric human, if
they're going to make this their soul um feeding method,
(10:30):
if this is gonna be the only place they get
their energy, it is it's pretty skimpy. You're talking about
living on the very edge here. Yeah, and there was
a you know, I think it's easy for us to say, like, well,
for for us, you and me, because we love our
monster science, it's easy for us to go, yeah, there's
science to be had there, but it's easy for us
as a culture to go, well, vampires, that's just some
(10:52):
made up stuff. Uh, there's there's nothing real going on there.
But in fact, there is a collision in the seventeen
hundreds between medicine science in the myth of the vampire um.
And this comes from that Mary Hallab article that I
quoted at the beginning of the episode Rural People's in
the seventeen hundreds, they relied on traditional medicine to ward
off vampires, and to them, taking an interest in something
(11:15):
like the supernatural was their means of conducting scientific inquiry.
So what they would do is they would pay a
fee to somebody who said, yes, I'm a vampire expert,
I have been trained, uh, and I can prevent the
spread of this right. So an example, UM, and I
wonder I thought of you when I was reading this,
because I'm sure you've heard of this before. In a
(11:36):
Serbian village, people thought there was a deceased soldier named
Arnold Paul and he kept coming back quote unquote as
a vampire and attacking villagers. Uh. And what happened was,
you know, it resulted in two waves of sort of
a vampire panic that lasted one was three weeks and
one was forty days. After he died. They eventually had
(11:56):
surgeons show up uh and disenter his audi so they
could attest yes, this is indeed a vampire. Uh. And
so one of these doctors, his name was Dr Fluckinger
and Dr Flukinger, brought this story to Western Europe where
it was actually debated amongst a lot of medical professionals,
(12:19):
in particular in Germany. And there was also a doctor
John Polar Doori, who wrote an influential story about vampires
that has actually uh. Mary Shelley talks about at the
beginning of Frankenstein. These two events together by two medical
professionals may have been responsible for establishing vampires as fantasy
and not as rural, you know, a supernatural fact. Uh.
(12:44):
And so basically the German academics and doctors debating this
led to uh, the original Pope Benedict in seventeen forty
nine declaring these vampires are superstition, they don't actually exist.
And that was sort of the beginning of it of
us acknowledging it as fictional. Interesting, Now, I know a
(13:04):
lot of you are probably wondering. Okay, So so we
we've already talked about the rarity of of a of
a mammal drinking blood is its soul of form of sustenance? Uh?
And and we we talked about what a poor form
of sustenance blood is. So how do we get to
that part via evolution? Why are there so few species
that do it well? The vampires in question likely emerged
(13:28):
twenty six million years ago, but we already mentioned bat
fossils are not too easily come by. Uh. And sure
we have a few fossil vampire bats, including a thirty
percent larger does Moodius dracula. Uh Yeah, that's that's a wonderful.
And but but these are these are total vampires that
(13:48):
you know, we don't really have those transitional forms. Uh.
And and then part of this comes from the fact
that you see so many of these bats that have
delicate bones and they're tropical region. Fossils of them are rare.
So we just have a few hypotheses as to how
vampires emerged. Uh. One hypothesis is that the proto vampire
bats that they these ancient species, they weren't quite vampires
(14:12):
yet they fed on blood and gorged ectoparasites found on
large animals, much like these various you know, tick eating birds,
you know, oxen and rhinos and whatnot. UM. So we're
you know, we're talking fat fall off the rump, prehistoric
kicks um. And you know earlier we mentioned the blurring
the term fall off the rump. They fell up. They're
(14:34):
just they're just there. There's there. It's say, once they're full,
they can't hold on anyone. Yeah, they're and they're mostly
the blood of another species. Um. And they're just there
for the picking. And we already mentioned that the blinds
are often blurred between parasite eater and just just an
eater of blood. And it's the same deal here, supported
by the fact that se bats um are insectivores, so
(14:59):
you know, anttis are iractants. But still you get the
idea they're used to eat. These are the type of
creatures that they eat already. And then if certain bats
began to depend more and more on on parasites, you
can see where the transition could take place. Plus, there
are anecdotal reports of vampire bats preying on vampire moths,
which is interesting. And and yes there is a vampire
(15:21):
moth and you'll find it in Malaysia, uh, the Ural
mountains and also southern Europe. Uh. And just like imagining
as we're explaining all these various different types of species
with vampire in front of their name, that there's like so,
I'm sure there's gotta be a fictional account there somewhere
of like u mythical vampires, but they like turn like
a bear or something like that. And then you've got
(15:43):
like vampire bears duking it out with vampire humans. You
know who's gonna eventually survive on the food chain, Right,
vampire bats are eating vampire moths, what's eating vampire humans? Yeah? Yeah,
vampire whales vampire whales. See that that has not been
explored at all yet. I think we've gotta we should
copy right that. So Bill Shoot wrote a wonderful book
(16:07):
a titled Dark Banquet Blood and the Curious Lives of
Blood Feeding Creatures. Highly recommend anyone interesting this topic check
it out. I noticed that this book was cited in
multiple of the resources that we're looking at for this. Yeah,
it's it's a great one. It's it's one that's you know,
very readable for a general audience. And he goes into
not only vampire bats, that he goes into various insects
(16:28):
as well, so it's a you know, a thorough engaging
exploration of the topic. But he points out that mutual
grooming behavior may have played a role in the evolution
of vampire bats as well. Because the vampire bats are
highly social, they spend five percent of their time grooming
one another, and Shoot suggests that they may have had
their first taste of blood consuming each other's kicks and
(16:50):
bedbug species, so you know it kind of you know,
they're in this situation with like, oh, these are great,
we should go try and get more of these, and
we just get it direct from the tap yeah, yeah,
take out the middleman. Now. It's also worth noting that
bat expert Brock Finton disagrees with another great name Brockton.
I'm a I'm a fauna expert. Brock points out that
(17:15):
ectoparasites are small, ecto parasites are difficult to find on
other animals, and vampire bats are restricted to the Americas.
So those impossible problems with this hypothesis. But Finton presents
hypothesis too, and that's the proto vampire bats fed on
insects and larva crawling around the wounds of large prehistoric mammals.
You know where I first heard this theory was on
(17:38):
Dr Anton Jessup's episode of Monster Science. So we talked
about vampires because that was where I learned the term
mega fauna. Yes, yeah, mega fauna the large you know,
today we pretty much are down to, you know, just
elephants is like the really great example of megafauna in
the old days when they could be sustained and you
had plenty of other creatures as well. With a whale, Yeah, yeah,
(18:02):
exactly similar. Yeah, because you have this large creature, this
just bounty of resources, it gets a cut on it,
right that becomes a just an area of increased economic activity,
a lot of organisms trying to feed off of it,
and then who's gonna feed on the feeders? Well, then
perhaps that's where this this begins. The vampire bats or
(18:23):
the proto vampire bats, they volunteer and jump in there
to get some of the the goods. So there's a
lot of back and forth in this hypothesis as well.
And then finally there's an arboreal feeding hypothesis, and this
is the idea that proto vampires foraged in trees, feeding
on small vertebrates, and over time they evolved uh to
capitalize on larger prey uh that they couldn't kill. At first,
(18:45):
they bit the animals that slept in the trees, and
eventually they adapted to prey on ground dwelling animals as well.
Because that gets into how vampire bats actually work. If
they swoop down um uh and they they open up
just a small opening on a like a sweeping cow
or what have you, and then lap the blood. Yeah,
they're not draining and cow dry. And it's the interesting
(19:07):
connection here to the studies we're gonna be talking about later,
as the premise really is the same for like, uh,
the vampire human myths, right, which is is that you know,
essentially it's not economical for a vampire bat or a
vampire human to drain you dry. They need to come
in do it quick in such a way that you
probably won't even notice, right. And that's where that like
(19:29):
comparing it to the nectivores is important because they've only
got that two second windows. So if a vampire bat
just flies up to a cow, makes a small incision,
laps up a little bit of blood for a couple
of seconds, and then flies away, cow is probably not
even gonna notice until the next day when it starts itchin. Yeah,
because it's also it's very much a stealth activity again there,
it's kind of like a business model, right. They can
(19:51):
only extend so much energy to pull off this heist
and still make a profit. Like the vampire bat cannot
get into a situation where it's going to try and
wrestle a cow. It's not gonna work. It has I'd
love to see it, Yeah, And I suppose vampire bats
are also probably not cooperative enough that they've come to
the point where like they're just gonna swarm onto a
(20:11):
cow and just drink it dry, you know. Yeah, well
I think it's one of those things where one vampire
bats gonna get away with it, Like one one criminal
can rob one store, all six criminals cannot rob the
same store at one competition for resources. Al Right, So
this brings us to the the process of drinking blood itself.
How do you drink blood as a mammal, as a
(20:33):
vampire bat? And then what could that possibly tell us
about how it might work for a human um? And uh,
it's a lot of this is chemical. Um, the vampire
bat makes a small cut and laps, does not suck
the blood. And uh, while the average wound inflicted by
a vampire bat would likely stop bleeding in one to
(20:53):
two minutes, they are key ingredients in the vampire bats
saliva that interfere with clotting for several hours. So you
you're talking about really a complex chemical cocktail in the saliva.
So yeah, we would definitely have to assume that any
kind of vampire, uh, humanoid sized vampire would also be
(21:13):
producing an anticoagulant. That's right. I wonder if they get
I haven't watched enough of like True Blood or anything
like that, but I wonder if they get into that
with those shows. I do not remember from all my
time watching True Blood. Um. Now, now, some people, some
experts also speculate that there's often a pain killing and
or skin softening enzyme in the saliva as well as
(21:35):
the bat will lick before they bite. So again, the
saliva is it's just a cocktail of essential blood drinking
chemicals and that they lick, they cut, then they lap
it up and those times work very similar to that
nectivore I was describing that. It's just kind of like this,
uh conveyor belt. It's just like working like a piston.
(21:57):
The way that it licks. When you watch the slow
motion videos of these things, it's kind of stunning. Yeah,
it causes that this movement causes the blood to flow
along a pair of grooves on the bottom of the
tongue and into the mouth. There's even a cleft in
the lip that allows the flow of blood. And wasn't
there like a period of time where some scientists thought
that that U the flaps on their nose, we're what
(22:18):
we're making the cuts themselves and things. Yeah, there, yeah,
there was, But of course it turns out that all
most of that has to do with that called location
has nothing to do with feeding. But but yeah, if
you're just looking at these these crazy looking or gamy
back faces, you could I can imagine one producing that
theory like, oh those look kind of sharp. Maybe they
(22:38):
kind of slashed their face back and forth in a
open a vein. So again, think of this though, is
as a heist. It's really a high stakes heist for
the vampire back um so that they're they're absorbing, Uh,
they're taken in this blood and absorption of the of
the of the water that makes up the ingested blood.
This carrious to the kidneys, noon to the bladder for excretion.
(23:02):
So they may have to fly off at any moment
when that cow begins to wake up, wake up and
they're peeing. Yeah, because they're having to process this in
real time that a sudden weight gain could be lethal.
Can't carry a one out around that much useless water,
so it needs to just pass it as quickly as possible. Um,
So these cows are getting back golden showers at the
same time. You can put it that way. Yeah, there's
(23:23):
that they end up having to to urinate a little
as they're feeding. Um approximate and approximately the blood volume
consume is excreted as urine in the first hour after feeding,
so again you gotta you gotta get rid of the
useless water as quickly as possible, and still at the
same time, there's a constant dehydration risk because we're talking
about a lot of urine here, and mammals break down
(23:45):
amino acids into uria in order to prevent the toxic
build up of ammonia. The vampire batch digestive system cranks
up more and more with feeding to eliminate the waste,
but in doing so, this is just constant risk of dehydration.
So they're just constantly one step ahead of the hydration,
which is another reason that you you only find vampire
bats and very very moist envied Okay, And that's uh
(24:09):
somewhat similar to what we talked about when we looked
at the science of the strain, Right you remember, the
vampires in the strain are just like I think, as
they're feeding, they're constantly emitting ammonia or something like that, right,
as like a waste product. And that's I haven't watched
a lot of the TV, so I don't think they
tracked them that way, and I think they do that
in the TV show. Don't they like they tracked the
(24:30):
ammonia stains with like UV lights or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I believe they do, and that that would fit in
nicely with this with the research here del Toro once
again looking at his anatomical manuals. Yeah so um so. Again,
it just comes back to this idea that that it's
a very very high risk fringe lifestyle that the vampire
bat is left with. They can't really store up a
(24:52):
lot of fat. They can't. This another reason you don't
find vampire bats and cold environments. They can't. They can't
se question themselves away for the winter and a cave
because they constantly have to get that blood. They're more
like a hunting bird than a true carnivore. If only
vampire bats could keep thralls, if they could keep like,
like uh, like maybe a mouse sized thrall in their
(25:15):
nest and they just drink a little bit here and there.
But the problem is they have to drink so much, right, Yeah, indeed,
if they could do something like they need a lot
of thralls. Yeah, they would need a lot of thralls
or set up some sort of honeybee environment where they're
they're essentially making like blood honey and storing it away.
I like that. Maybe they'll get there one day, but
for now, we we've got this earth vampire bats. Yeah. Well,
(25:37):
that actually leads pretty nicely into uh, what really brought
us into talking about this. We're gonna take a quick break,
but when we come back, we're going to talk about
a brand new study that looks at the physics of
how we would drain blood from a human being if
they were our vampick Thrall. Alright, we're back, and we
(26:04):
had so far we're looking at we're trying to imagine
a humanoid vampire. We're looking at an emaciated, stealthy nonsperrato
that slips into your bedroom, licks your neck with us,
and then with a strange groove tongue, then slices it
with a specialized tooth and then lapse up the blood
before and peas a little bit before slinking away into
the night. But how long does this non sperato in
(26:27):
question have to fee? Well, the answer has been discovered,
and it was actually just discovered last fall, and uh,
actually Robert has written about it already. We were inspired
by this. We both saw the study on the same day.
Oh no, actually, you found it, did I? Oh, I
was the one who found that. You were the one
who felt okay, and we we we have pitch meetings
here and at the beginning of the week we both
(26:49):
pitched the story and then the uh you know, our
editor said, you guys gotta do this, and I said, well,
it's monster science. That's Robert. Robert's gonna do the vampire
long as we get to do it for the podcast.
And I ended up writing about Batman Superman did about
the various Superman Vatman uh interactions, So you got the
bat kind of a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So but
(27:11):
that was the inspiration for us to dive into this
because we said, this study is so cool, let's extrapolated
outwards and really look at the physics of it. And
turns out a lot of people have done research into this,
so let's talk about this study. Yeah. This comes to
us from the University of Leicester in the UK. It
was published in the Journal of Physics Special Topics. Uh,
and it's a whole team of researchers here worked on it.
(27:33):
They decided to just weigh in on just how much
blood a human vamppire would drink and how long it
would take them to drink, because I don't think this
is anything anyone really uh put a lot of thought
to in the past. But there are you know, there
there are going to be limits here. I hope people
making vampire movies and television going forward to take this
science into account and use it in their calculations, including
(27:56):
the mathematics that we'll talk about after this too, because
there's a large your game at play here. But let's
we're gonna zoom right in and look at a vampire
lord and their thrall. Premise here being that you don't
want to just drain your thrall dry, right, You want
to keep them on hand so that you've got a
constant tap of blood available. Yeah, you want to be
able to come back. However often I'm guessing, uh, you know,
(28:20):
if you're going by like blood donation standards, it's gonna
be over a month between visits if they're playing by
the rules. Yeah. Well, and that's assuming that this humanoid
sized vampire doesn't have to drink as much blood uh
comparative to its body weight as a vampire bat does.
Otherwise they just have like a basement full of people
(28:41):
that they're drinking from constantly, right, So the first thing
they had to decide is, yeah, how much, um, how
much blood are they going to drink? And so, based
on information from the American College of Surgeons Advanced Trauma
Life Support or a t l S program, the researchers
figure that that amount would be about of your blood volume. Technically,
(29:01):
that is that that's the upper limit of a class
one hemorrhage. So hey, if your thraw out there, do
not let your vampiric overlord talk you into a class
to hemorrhage. That's over unless he's willing to make good
on his promise. And actually the gist here is that
it's similar to the vampire bat scenario in that the
(29:21):
percent is from the model that a vampire would be
able to drink enough secretly, uh that you wouldn't notice
and it would be able to get away. So like,
maybe it sneaks into your bedroom at night and it
just like opens a vein and it starts going is
the cap before your heart rate starts to change and
you would notice effects on your circulatory system. Uh. And
(29:43):
in particular, the model for this study, they have their
vampires specifically drinking from the external kartid artery. And they've
also modeled the A order and coatid arteries as being
smooth tubes when the assumed air pressure of one standard
atmospheric pressure unit. So obviously this is not uh true
(30:04):
to life, right, Like, we don't all have perfectly smooth
tubes with the exact perfect atmospheric pressure in it. But hey,
we got to solve these problems somehow. So, as we
previously mentioned, they decided to go with the bat model
of blood drinking makes more sense than looking mosquitoes, right,
they were looking at free flowing lapping as we've discussed,
rather than sucking from a pair of point five millimeter
(30:26):
neck punctures. And then they calculated the average diameter of
the orda and the five connected arteries, as well as
blood pressure and the heart driving velocity of the flowing blood.
So they really got into the biology and the fluid
mechanics of the whole. But they didn't They didn't factor
in anti coagulants, So this is assuming that there's no
anti coagulant chemical applied by the vampire. Interesting, I didn't
(30:48):
notice that during my first read of this. Now, a
few equations later, the researchers determined this that any self
respecting vampire needs six point four minutes to drain a
polite point seven five liters of blood from his earth draw.
So to put that in perspective, it takes less than
an hour to give point four seven leaders during a
(31:10):
blood drive where they take eight of your blood. Yeah,
but they don't drink any of it. I know they drink. Well,
we don't know. I mean they might be that's what
those curtains are there. Yeah, I mean, in a sense
it is. If it is used, it is it becomes
a part of another person. So it's as well in
a sense it's it's concerned. Now, these results are based
(31:33):
on a couple of mathematical assumptions that the people doing
the research made specifically about human biology. So I'm gonna
run through these real quick. The first one is that
the five arteries that split out of our a orda
have total even thickness, which you know, I doubt that's true,
and everybody the diameter of the aorta is four centimeters,
(31:54):
which is that's known as the known carotid artery diameter. Right.
That seems big to me. You think about that four centimeters.
I guess that makes sense, but it's a major highway to. Uh.
The velocity of blood coming out of your a or
to has a mean speed not not like means speed,
but at average speed of point one milliseconds. Uh. The
(32:15):
internal arteries have a point five centimeter diameter. The average
human blood pressure would be one millimeters of mercury, and
the average density of whole blood is one thousand sixty
kms per cubic meter at room temperature. So they thought
of it all, uh, and they calculated it out based
(32:35):
on the average human body having a total of five
liters of blood inside of it. Okay, alright, so that
gives us, uh, that gives us some you know physics
grounding on exactly how much blood is gonna be taken,
how long uh it takes to consume it. Yeah, so
to crunch that at six point four minutes, that scene,
(33:00):
I mean, I guess, like maybe I'm a light sleeper,
but that seems to me like I would notice, um,
but you you know, like I'm thinking, no s Feratu style,
like sneaks into the room and there's a a woman
whose neck is is just a positioned just the right way. Um,
I don't know. Maybe they just don't notice. Yeah, I mean,
as long as she didn't have a neck pillow or anything,
(33:21):
or if she's you know, she's sleeping under the covers
completely and neck pillows like modern enemy of Vampires never
even thought about that, Yeah, because he can't very well
just pull that off, right. So all right, that's the
micro version of it, right of how the drinking of
the blood would work on one vampire on one human
(33:42):
if they were trying to drink it real quick, get
away with it without getting caught, or just have a
thrall on hand and keep them alive. Let's broaden this
a little bit. So we turned to Anissa Mary Ramia,
who is at the University of Ottawa in eleven and
for a mathematic model ling of infectious diseases class, wrote
(34:03):
the paper vampires do they want to suck our blood?
And I want to I want to take an aside
here to say I was disappointed in you, and I
am disappointed in Ramia for spelling want with a W.
It should have been do they vant to suck our blood?
Because that would have that would have been because I
believe you had the do they want to suck our blood?
Or want to suck your blood in the title of
(34:25):
the original piece of the story we just talked about, Okay,
so Ramya's goal here was to use mathematical models to
deduce whether vampires could exist. In particular, could we as
human beings live alongside a creature who wants to suck
our blood? So is it a sustainable creature? Yeah? So
(34:46):
she looks at she proposes several models and I'll present
them here, and she uses theoretical data based off of
the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So she's working
off of some of the premises within that mythos, because
you know, vampire mythos varies from yeah you gotta you
gotta choose one and if you gotta go with one,
I guess it seems like a pretty good one. Yeah.
(35:08):
So um, she starts with the first model that was
actually written by somebody else. It was written by Dr
Sohan Gandhi and Dr Costas J. I'm gonna butcher this
name ft the EMU sure sorry, uh cost Us. Anyways,
that they had this really cool paper called Ghosts, Vampires
(35:28):
and Zombies Cinema Fiction Versus Physics Reality. It was published
in Skeptical inquirer in seven and we're gonna call this,
or at least Ramia does the s V model. Okay,
this is the bare bones model. So going with statistics
that say that the present human population is six point
nine billion people in rising, these guys argued that vampires
(35:50):
never existed and could have never existed, because if they did,
the human race would have been wiped out in three years.
The way that they figured this out was by using
a mathematical concept called geometric progression, and this is used
to calculate the interest in economics and finance, or to
find the quantity of decaying radioactive elements in geology and physics.
(36:13):
So cool application of pre existing model. The constraint there
is that the world population is constant, so there's no
in their study, there's no birth rate or death rate fluctuations. Okay. Uh.
It also assumes that there is a constant rate that
vampires turn humans into other vampires, only doing so on
(36:34):
the first of each month. So I don't know why
that would be particularly the date. But so the vampires
have all gotten together and said, okay, we can only
do this on the first aga. Uh. And so this
susceptible population would decline over time, while the vampire population
would increase at the same time. At that rate, there
would be no humans left on Earth after three years. Now.
(36:57):
One of the obvious problems I've i've I've had when
I've encountered this kind of argument before is that you're
assuming the vampires are not making some efforts to keep
themselves from destroying each other. Because even if there is
you know, an unsustainable species, I mean, you can make
arguments that humans in our present form are also an
unsustainable species, and you know, and maybe we're doomed, but
(37:20):
also maybe we're able to stave off extinction by curbing
our self destructive tendencies at least a little bit. Yeah,
Ramya keeps adding complexities like that into the various models,
but she never gets to that one, which is, Yeah,
I like that idea. Like that, vampires, which are you know,
based off of our anatomy and our psychology and Russia,
(37:44):
would probably have as much in fighting as we humans do, right,
They wouldn't just all cooperate perfectly in order to drain
blood together? Yeah? Not surely. Not everybody gets the good
blood now, but not everybody gets to have as much
blood as they want. So she extrapolates their data out
to the second model, and this is the SVR model,
and it includes data for the rate that humans are turned,
(38:06):
the rate that humans are killed by vampire, as well
as the birth rate and the death rate uh, and
as well as all non human related death rates for vampires.
And that wasn't um extrapolated on other than I think
that that is just maybe it's vampire on vampire violence,
like you accidentally like walk into the sun or something
(38:30):
like that, UM, but there is She later does get
into human on vampire violence and how that would factor
into it. So her next one, and this is a
the SVR plus model. This is her third model. UH.
It's basically that humans are aware of the existence of
vampires and they actively hunt and kill them, and it's quantifiable.
(38:50):
There's a rate that we can quantify how fast humans
can kill vampires. So that would mean as an employed
vampire hunter in this scenario, you have a quota that
you're expected to hit it each month, and there's no
reason you shouldn't be able to hit it. And not
only that, not only are all the vampire hunters expected
to meet their quotas, but then there's also a slayer
(39:12):
that is more efficient at killing vampires than any of
the other hunters. So this is factoring in the Buffy
methods obviously. So that's on top of all of the
other data predictions in the mathematical models presented so far.
We had two more models to go. Oh, I really
hope one includes blade. Would be awesome if they're like
and then blades there, I think she would just she
(39:34):
would just be ice skating uphill with that one. All right,
we'll cut that little bit of awkwardness alright. So, yeah,
Model four does not include blade, but it adds in
the rationale that it's not in vampire's best interest to
turn every single human that they drink from, right, And
this kind of goes along with the other study that
we were just talking about with that drinking. So I
(39:55):
think we can assume that that's kind of how they're
working here. Uh. And the reasons why, well, there'd be
too many dead bodies that would arouse suspicion first of all,
but then there would also be an increase in the
competition for human blood resources, and then that's probably where
you get the in fighting between vampires. So it uses
parameters that in order to be turned. You have to
(40:17):
both be bitten by a vampire and then you subsequently
have to drink a vampire's blood and then you turn
into a vampire. Yes, and that's certainly the model we
see in a lot of vampire fictions. Yea. And the
last one, uh, she calls the predator prey model, and
this uses this as an actual population dynamic mathematical theory
(40:39):
called predator prey uh in. In biology, the idea that
the carrying capacity of a given environment is the maximum
number of a particular species that can be supported and
sustained indefinitely, given that food, water, and other necessities are
all available in that environment. And it was previously approached
(40:59):
by a guy named Dr Brian Thomas in two thousand
two in a paper called Vampire Population Ecology. So she
cleaned that up and applied it here. I love that
we are not the only ones who are hungry. No
pun intended for vampire science. Yeah, there's there's a legacy
here of of sort of epidemic consideration of vampires. So
(41:22):
the first case here represents that human and vampire populations
eventually go extinct. The second case that she shows are
when vampires are extinct but the human population hovers somewhere
near its carrying capacity. And the third case is where
human and vampire populations are capable of coexisting. And the
important thing to notice here is that the human equilibrium
(41:45):
population does not depend on its own carrying capacity. However,
the vampire population does depend on the human populations carrying capacity.
So basically, there needs to be a constant influx of
human population in order for vampires to have a sustainable
coexistence with us. Otherwise we go back to scenario number
(42:07):
one where they drink us dry in three years and
then what are they left with. It's like that movie
what is it called Daybreakers, the one with Ethan Hawk
where everybody is a vampire. Um. So, yeah, the human
population doesn't depend on its own caring capacity, the vampire
population does. We are not large enough to support a
vampire population. So I think by looking at this mathematical model,
(42:29):
we can deduce that there aren't vampires. Okay, maybe mathematically
you don't have to. You can take that neck pillow
off tonight. Nothing is going to drink your blood. Although
I will point out, and this is a note in
her actual paper, she says this does not take into
account quote large scale supernatural events like the apocalypse. So
(42:54):
she admits, look, there's not a lot of data here
for her to work with, but she's basing off the
TV show. Sure, if somebody out there wants to go
and watch every Buffy episode and note the frequency of
vampire encounters, feeds, kills, and turns, you can apply that
in these models and extrapolate the data outward. And well,
what I like about these studies is they kind of
give you a starting point and from there you can
sort of tweak the vampire mythos to make it more
(43:15):
sustainable or more believable, or throw in certain behaviors or safeguards.
They're they're gonna help it make sense. This is what
I feel like del Toro did. Yeah, he maybe didn't
sit down with these mathematical models, but like they think
of stuff like this in that show, you know the
practicalities of a vampire invasion, especially upon New York. Yeah,
and also looking at it in the strain, Uh, looking
(43:36):
at it too is what you can have the organism,
and then you're gonna have sort of offshoots and mutations
that can be less sustainable and therefore our risk to
both the humans and the established vampires well. By applying
these models, she concluded that if an outbreak of vampires
were to break out in an area like say Sunnydale, California,
(43:58):
where people were generally really aware and there was a
slayer involved, and this is not counting hell Mouth, she said,
no supernatural events exactly, it would be less likely uh
than an endemic that would occur in a population like
somewhere like where she lives, Ottawa. Uh. And she says, look,
there's no slayer in the population, and Ottawa is generally
(44:19):
unaware of vampires, so it might be a problem there.
But she takes into account and this is where it
gets crazy. She applies what she calls the g factor
to a locale and this is how much garlic is
in particular areas. And the way that she does this
is she takes Google Maps and she plots out all
the swarm of shops that are in Ottawa, and she
(44:44):
scientifically says that the reasons the scent of garlic would
make it difficult for vampires to navigate through a populated
area are because of these swarmer shops. She plots it
on the map and then she even gives each store
an effective radius and The way that she mathematically computes
this radius is based on the rating of the restaurant,
it's popularity and therefore how much garlic you could assume
(45:08):
is in each diners system after they leave. So as
they're leaving the restaurant, they're creating this radius because they've
got like a certain amount of garlic in their blood
and on their lips, and that the vampires would smell
that and basically like veer away from it. Okay, So
there are certain there there would be certain cuisines that
and and therefore certain geographical regions the vampires would just
(45:30):
have to avoid, Like they just could not go to Italy.
They are parts of China, they would not be able
to get a firm foothold, and they have to really
go to those Icelandic countries. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And she
finally recommends she doesn't break down the math on this,
but she says, you know what might also be a
good idea is bless all the bodies of water in town.
That way, it would make it difficult for the vampires
(45:51):
to cross them. Uh, And I think they don't they
do something to that effect in uh in the strain
or is it just that they can't cross moving bodies. Yeah,
they plan it at Which is another which is an
often overlooked a little detail from the Vampire Folklores is
that they can't cross moving bodies of water, and they
I think they play into the strain that it might
have something to do with like essentially their little worms
(46:14):
something like that. Yeah, and I think, if I remember correctly,
I hope this isn't a spoiler for the TV show
that the way they get away with it isn't what
they just like hop on the back of like subway
trains that are going underneath the rivers. And yeah, well
you know another bit from from Vampire Folklores that's rarely explored,
certainly in the scientific literature, but also in fiction is
(46:35):
the idea that they're obsessed with with knots and uh
and like intricate fabrics. I think the only bit of
fiction that I've seen it used in UH is habit.
I don't know if you know when Larry Fresden, I believe, No,
I don't know this one, Okay, yeah, it's it was
an old indie picture, kind of a slight like nineties
(46:56):
indie remake of Dracula, but very much a in be
filmed with an indie vibe, and there's a scene where
the vampire is transfixed by you know, some sort of
knotted fact. Interesting, so they're just like constantly tying their shoes. Yeah,
what's the situation is that if you want to VAMPI
you want to protect yourself from a vampire, just hang
like an intricate knot or some sort of woven thing
(47:17):
outside of your house. The vampire will come to it
and then they're just transfixed by it and they start
messing around with it. Then the sun comes up in
their toes. I wonder if that's connected to knots of garlic. Oh,
I don't know. Maybe maybe just double up on the
hunt exactly. Yeah. Well that's it. We got vampire math,
vampire physics, vampire evolution. I think we've figured it out.
(47:38):
So what do you think vampires possible? H me? Uh, well,
so certainly if we based some of those hypotheses for
vampire bats off of human humanoid vampires, you know, maybe
they were drinking blood off of mega fauna and they
but then they went into the shadows. They've been sneaking
(47:58):
that fifteen percent off of us for a long time now.
But the only way that they would be able to
get away with it is if they kept themselves in
check with that fifteen percent. Otherwise, Uh, they would either
kill the entire human race or we would figure out
that they're there and we would hunt them down. Yeah,
they for them to exist, it would just be this
very stealthy, very strategic and and just and also just
(48:20):
very dangerous position. Um, you know, like the vampire bats.
It would just be it's a heist with high stakes
and they have to they have to carry it out
just so in order to avoid capture and extermination. Well,
I'm gonna sleep better tonight. I'm probably gonna sleep better
than I have since I was a little kid and
I saw that episode of The Amazing Spider Man that
we're Dracula showed up. So um, thank you to the
(48:43):
scientists involved in all this research. Yes, we can all
put aside our garlic knight pill lives tonight. All right.
So so there you have it. Hey, if you want
more on this topic other topics, go to stuff about
your mind dot com. That's where we'll find a landing
page for this episode. Um, various bits of vampire content.
You can just throw vampire into the search of oar.
There you'll also find links out to our various social
(49:05):
medi accounts such as Twitter and Facebook and Tumbler also
Instagram now and we're blow the Mind on most of those.
And if you're a vampire and you have a secret
method for getting away with drinking more than fift percent
of a person's blood in one sitting, please write us
at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com.
(49:33):
Well more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from housetop work
dot com. Modern science has not only shown us how
fragile human life is, but even the entire planet, or
the entire universe as we know it, is on the
(00:24):
edge of extinction. Perhaps only the already dead, the zombies,
and the vampires, will have the strength to survive the
apocalyptic disasters so often predicted these days, involving exploding sun spots,
gigantic volcanoes, meteor attacks, and rampaging epidemics that can wipe
out whole populations in an instant. Hey, welcome to Stuff
(00:49):
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Christian Sager, and we just began the show with
a quote from Mary Halab from her article Vampires and
Medical Science that is printed in the February two fifteen
issue of the Journal of Popular Culture. Why, because we're
going to talk about the physics and mathematics of vampire
(01:10):
blood sucking today. Yeah. Now, if you're a long time
listening to Stuff to Blow your Mind, uh, and you
visit our website, perhaps you're familiar with the Monster Science
the video series. You know from all these avenues that
we've we've touched on vampires before in the past. Uh,
this time, we're we're largely going to deal with you know,
a little a little physics, a little um fluid mechanics,
(01:33):
a little mathematics, as well as just taking you through
the the evolution of natural world vampires as well. Uh.
But yeah, certainly we love vampires. Here's stuff to blow
your mind. I think as as uh you know, as
a people humans uh cannot get over the Yeah, as
(01:55):
you know, we are fans of and did an episode
on the Strange, that's right. Uh, and it was interesting.
There was stuff in the research for today's episode that
brought up the strain for me that I didn't find
when we were doing research on the strain um, like
in particular different kinds of tongues and bats and how
they consumed blood. Yeah. I mean, we could really just
(02:15):
do vampire episode after vampire episode and find just probably
a whole podcast out there vampires. I mean, and even
when you're getta do this, our fascination with it, just
the mythological appeal of vampires, you know, despite our best
efforts to just totally kill it with with with a
steak in the party, with a steak in the heart,
(02:36):
especially a cinematic steak in the heart. Through some of
just the sort of trite rehashes that we see over
and over again, we still can't get enough. There's still
something just hideously romantic about the vampire. Oh yeah, I'm
always on the lookout for a good new vampire movie. Um.
And I think the last one that I saw, did
(02:57):
you see Byzantium? I did not think. I have it
in my cute. It's an interesting movie. It's not it's
not like mind blowing or anything like that, but it was.
It was a nice take on the vampire mythos um. Well, like,
I love how the Strain has done and we talked
about this in the Strain episode, how they've like really
taken into account like anatomical differences in nature incorporate and
(03:19):
incorporated that into their vampire mythos um. But yeah, I
just as a horror fan, or maybe just as a
cinema fan, I'm always waiting for somebody to find like
the next cool hook on it. You know. I'm like,
I'm thinking of Near Dark a lot of fun. Yeah. Um,
Bill Paxton roll on that, yeah, Lance Hendrickson too, pretty
(03:41):
much everybody from Aliens, Yeah, yeah, it was a Katherine
Bigelow film. It was. Yeah. Now, for the purposes of
this episode again, we're gonna we're going to limit our
discussion of vampires to physics, mathematics, and evolution, um, you know,
basic real world biology without getting very you know, without
doing too much the way of dragging in anymore folklore, mythology,
(04:03):
film history, etcetera. And really the best place to start,
in my opinion is um is by looking at bats.
I mean, bats are pretty much the vampire bat is
one of our most prevalent modern examples. Uh. The the
main parallel between the idea of a blood drinking human
uh in fiction is a real life blood drinking um vertebrate.
(04:28):
You know. It's interesting about that that I learned doing
research for this episode was I had always assumed that
we called them. Sorry, I had always assumed that the
vampire myth came out of people having witnessed vampire bats.
I did not realize that it was sort of like
the hydra that we've talked about recently, that it was
(04:49):
actually the myth that came first, and then when we
discovered vampire bats, we gave them the name. Yeah, that's right,
because these areas where you many of the areas in
the world where you had the vampire mythology that you
didn't actually have any blood drinking bats. There are million
South America and and part of that has to do
I mean, most of it has to do with some
(05:10):
of the limitations of blood drinking. So let's talk about
the bats and the birds. They have a great deal
in common. They're very different organisms. And the birds we
have the avians that emerged about a hundred and fifty
million years ago in the Jurassic Period. They went out
to fly, swim, trot, burrow all over the world. Meanwhile,
mammalian bats date back between seventy five and a hundred
(05:31):
million years and uh, it's harder to say because um quote,
bats are one of the most diverse groups of mammals today,
they are one of the least common groups in the
fossil record. Bats have small light skeletons that do not
preserve well, and we have very little information on the
early evolution of the group. And that's from a University
(05:52):
of Edinburgh page that I'll link to in the landing
page for this episode that deals with just sort of
the basic evolution of bats. Have you ever been to
or heard of the bridge that's in Austin, Texas that
just has like millions of bats underneath it and if
you like hang out there at the right time of night,
you can just see them all swarming out. I've seen
video of it. I went to Austin on vacation two
(06:13):
years ago and it was awesome, Like we got to
see it and it was really, uh, really something to behold.
But also apparently are co workers who were in Austin
recently for south By Southwest. We're gonna try to do
a video on it, but the bats wouldn't come out.
They were not cooperative. Um, so both bats and birds
learned to fly in their own ways. Uh. And there
(06:34):
are there are other fascinating examples of their conversion evolution. Uh.
Several dozen bats species and more than three hundred species
of hummingbirds evolved to resemble each other anatomically and behaviorally
solely because they existed in similar environments and exploited a
similar resource, that being nectar. Yeah, so nectar feeding bats
(06:56):
they have pretty strange anatomies as well. Like I think
we hyper focus on the vampire bats, but really I
think it's something like three out of like a thousand
and one hundred bats species drink blood, so it's kind
of interesting that we focus so much on that. But
so these nectar feeding bats, there's one called the orange
(07:17):
nectar feeding back, or it's a Latin name is Lancophilia Robustah.
It can extend its tongue out to drink the nectar,
and it has grooves on its tongue that undulate like waves,
forming a conveyor belt to just basically conveyor belts drag
the nectar up to it. It's a it's gullet. And
(07:38):
the way, the reason why is that these bats way
fifteen grams each. They have to drink one point five
times their own weight every single night. So that means
that each one of these bats has to visit somewhere
between eight hundred and a thousand flowers every night in
order to survive. Um. So it has to be really quick.
That's why it's evolved this crazy tongue. It only has
(07:59):
two second visit, so it's just like boom, flies into
the flower, sucks out the nectar with its crazy tongue,
and flies away. Now imagine something like this with somebody
who drinks blood, right, um, And in fact there's also
a bat in South America that has a tongue like
the vampires in the strain that we had talked about.
Its tongue is one point five times the length of
(08:20):
the rest of its body, and it reaches all the
way down its throat between its sternam and its heart.
So it's just this huge organ that's shooting up out
of its body through its mouth, grabbing this is a nectar,
drinking one again, grabbing the nectar and the yankee back down. Um.
But those are nectivores, right, and we're here to talk
(08:41):
about san guivores. Yes, sanguavar is the blood drinkers. And
there's little or no convergence between birds and bats when
it comes to drinking blood. And now there are birds
that occasionally or even frequently feed on on blood. Um.
Vampire finches of the Glastical Sylands occasionally feed by drinking
of the blood of other birds. Meanwhile, you have, you know,
(09:02):
plenty of examples of birds that feed on ticks and
other ectoparasites on large animals, and they sometimes cross that
line between dining on stolen blood and stealing it for themselves.
But none of these birds is an obligate cyclevore an
obligate blood drinker. The vampire bat stands alone among all vertebrates,
is the only aerial or terrestrial obligate blood drinker. It's
(09:25):
all they consume aside from their mother's milk. And so,
to give you a comparison to those nectar drinking bats
that I was talking about earlier, blood is actually pretty
skimpy when it comes to protein and fat. The kind
of energy they need water, so vampire bats get almost
no fat at all out of it. Subsequently, they have
to consume this is different from the nectar ones. They
(09:47):
only have to consume half their weight in blood each
night to stay alive. Imagine if you and I had
to do that, if we had to consume half our
way in blood, Like that's even uh fantastic by the
imagination of vampires, right, Like, that's a lot of blood.
And we're gonna get to that later on when we
talk about the physics of actually drinking blood from a
thrall if you're a vampire. Yeah, I think that's certainly,
(10:10):
certainly something that's very important to keep in mind here though,
is that that blood is not this just font of
energy and resources. Uh, there's there's very little power in
the blood and for a vampire bat and certainly if
you're gonna extrapolate that and say a vampiric human, if
they're going to make this their soul um feeding method,
(10:30):
if this is gonna be the only place they get
their energy, it is it's pretty skimpy. You're talking about
living on the very edge here. Yeah, and there was
a you know, I think it's easy for us to say, like, well,
for for us, you and me, because we love our
monster science, it's easy for us to go, yeah, there's
science to be had there, but it's easy for us
as a culture to go, well, vampires, that's just some
(10:52):
made up stuff. Uh, there's there's nothing real going on there.
But in fact, there is a collision in the seventeen
hundreds between medicine science in the myth of the vampire um.
And this comes from that Mary Hallab article that I
quoted at the beginning of the episode Rural People's in
the seventeen hundreds, they relied on traditional medicine to ward
off vampires, and to them, taking an interest in something
(11:15):
like the supernatural was their means of conducting scientific inquiry.
So what they would do is they would pay a
fee to somebody who said, yes, I'm a vampire expert,
I have been trained, uh, and I can prevent the
spread of this right. So an example, UM, and I
wonder I thought of you when I was reading this,
because I'm sure you've heard of this before. In a
(11:36):
Serbian village, people thought there was a deceased soldier named
Arnold Paul and he kept coming back quote unquote as
a vampire and attacking villagers. Uh. And what happened was,
you know, it resulted in two waves of sort of
a vampire panic that lasted one was three weeks and
one was forty days. After he died. They eventually had
(11:56):
surgeons show up uh and disenter his audi so they
could attest yes, this is indeed a vampire. Uh. And
so one of these doctors, his name was Dr Fluckinger
and Dr Flukinger, brought this story to Western Europe where
it was actually debated amongst a lot of medical professionals,
(12:19):
in particular in Germany. And there was also a doctor
John Polar Doori, who wrote an influential story about vampires
that has actually uh. Mary Shelley talks about at the
beginning of Frankenstein. These two events together by two medical
professionals may have been responsible for establishing vampires as fantasy
and not as rural, you know, a supernatural fact. Uh.
(12:44):
And so basically the German academics and doctors debating this
led to uh, the original Pope Benedict in seventeen forty
nine declaring these vampires are superstition, they don't actually exist.
And that was sort of the beginning of it of
us acknowledging it as fictional. Interesting, Now, I know a
(13:04):
lot of you are probably wondering. Okay, So so we
we've already talked about the rarity of of a of
a mammal drinking blood is its soul of form of sustenance? Uh?
And and we we talked about what a poor form
of sustenance blood is. So how do we get to
that part via evolution? Why are there so few species
that do it well? The vampires in question likely emerged
(13:28):
twenty six million years ago, but we already mentioned bat
fossils are not too easily come by. Uh. And sure
we have a few fossil vampire bats, including a thirty
percent larger does Moodius dracula. Uh Yeah, that's that's a wonderful.
And but but these are these are total vampires that
(13:48):
you know, we don't really have those transitional forms. Uh.
And and then part of this comes from the fact
that you see so many of these bats that have
delicate bones and they're tropical region. Fossils of them are rare.
So we just have a few hypotheses as to how
vampires emerged. Uh. One hypothesis is that the proto vampire
bats that they these ancient species, they weren't quite vampires
(14:12):
yet they fed on blood and gorged ectoparasites found on
large animals, much like these various you know, tick eating birds,
you know, oxen and rhinos and whatnot. UM. So we're
you know, we're talking fat fall off the rump, prehistoric
kicks um. And you know earlier we mentioned the blurring
the term fall off the rump. They fell up. They're
(14:34):
just they're just there. There's there. It's say, once they're full,
they can't hold on anyone. Yeah, they're and they're mostly
the blood of another species. Um. And they're just there
for the picking. And we already mentioned that the blinds
are often blurred between parasite eater and just just an
eater of blood. And it's the same deal here, supported
by the fact that se bats um are insectivores, so
(14:59):
you know, anttis are iractants. But still you get the
idea they're used to eat. These are the type of
creatures that they eat already. And then if certain bats
began to depend more and more on on parasites, you
can see where the transition could take place. Plus, there
are anecdotal reports of vampire bats preying on vampire moths,
which is interesting. And and yes there is a vampire
(15:21):
moth and you'll find it in Malaysia, uh, the Ural
mountains and also southern Europe. Uh. And just like imagining
as we're explaining all these various different types of species
with vampire in front of their name, that there's like so,
I'm sure there's gotta be a fictional account there somewhere
of like u mythical vampires, but they like turn like
a bear or something like that. And then you've got
(15:43):
like vampire bears duking it out with vampire humans. You
know who's gonna eventually survive on the food chain, Right,
vampire bats are eating vampire moths, what's eating vampire humans? Yeah? Yeah,
vampire whales vampire whales. See that that has not been
explored at all yet. I think we've gotta we should
copy right that. So Bill Shoot wrote a wonderful book
(16:07):
a titled Dark Banquet Blood and the Curious Lives of
Blood Feeding Creatures. Highly recommend anyone interesting this topic check
it out. I noticed that this book was cited in
multiple of the resources that we're looking at for this. Yeah,
it's it's a great one. It's it's one that's you know,
very readable for a general audience. And he goes into
not only vampire bats, that he goes into various insects
(16:28):
as well, so it's a you know, a thorough engaging
exploration of the topic. But he points out that mutual
grooming behavior may have played a role in the evolution
of vampire bats as well. Because the vampire bats are
highly social, they spend five percent of their time grooming
one another, and Shoot suggests that they may have had
their first taste of blood consuming each other's kicks and
(16:50):
bedbug species, so you know it kind of you know,
they're in this situation with like, oh, these are great,
we should go try and get more of these, and
we just get it direct from the tap yeah, yeah,
take out the middleman. Now. It's also worth noting that
bat expert Brock Finton disagrees with another great name Brockton.
I'm a I'm a fauna expert. Brock points out that
(17:15):
ectoparasites are small, ecto parasites are difficult to find on
other animals, and vampire bats are restricted to the Americas.
So those impossible problems with this hypothesis. But Finton presents
hypothesis too, and that's the proto vampire bats fed on
insects and larva crawling around the wounds of large prehistoric mammals.
You know where I first heard this theory was on
(17:38):
Dr Anton Jessup's episode of Monster Science. So we talked
about vampires because that was where I learned the term
mega fauna. Yes, yeah, mega fauna the large you know,
today we pretty much are down to, you know, just
elephants is like the really great example of megafauna in
the old days when they could be sustained and you
had plenty of other creatures as well. With a whale, Yeah, yeah,
(18:02):
exactly similar. Yeah, because you have this large creature, this
just bounty of resources, it gets a cut on it,
right that becomes a just an area of increased economic activity,
a lot of organisms trying to feed off of it,
and then who's gonna feed on the feeders? Well, then
perhaps that's where this this begins. The vampire bats or
(18:23):
the proto vampire bats, they volunteer and jump in there
to get some of the the goods. So there's a
lot of back and forth in this hypothesis as well.
And then finally there's an arboreal feeding hypothesis, and this
is the idea that proto vampires foraged in trees, feeding
on small vertebrates, and over time they evolved uh to
capitalize on larger prey uh that they couldn't kill. At first,
(18:45):
they bit the animals that slept in the trees, and
eventually they adapted to prey on ground dwelling animals as well.
Because that gets into how vampire bats actually work. If
they swoop down um uh and they they open up
just a small opening on a like a sweeping cow
or what have you, and then lap the blood. Yeah,
they're not draining and cow dry. And it's the interesting
(19:07):
connection here to the studies we're gonna be talking about later,
as the premise really is the same for like, uh,
the vampire human myths, right, which is is that you know,
essentially it's not economical for a vampire bat or a
vampire human to drain you dry. They need to come
in do it quick in such a way that you
probably won't even notice, right. And that's where that like
(19:29):
comparing it to the nectivores is important because they've only
got that two second windows. So if a vampire bat
just flies up to a cow, makes a small incision,
laps up a little bit of blood for a couple
of seconds, and then flies away, cow is probably not
even gonna notice until the next day when it starts itchin. Yeah,
because it's also it's very much a stealth activity again there,
it's kind of like a business model, right. They can
(19:51):
only extend so much energy to pull off this heist
and still make a profit. Like the vampire bat cannot
get into a situation where it's going to try and
wrestle a cow. It's not gonna work. It has I'd
love to see it, Yeah, And I suppose vampire bats
are also probably not cooperative enough that they've come to
the point where like they're just gonna swarm onto a
(20:11):
cow and just drink it dry, you know. Yeah, well
I think it's one of those things where one vampire
bats gonna get away with it, Like one one criminal
can rob one store, all six criminals cannot rob the
same store at one competition for resources. Al Right, So
this brings us to the the process of drinking blood itself.
How do you drink blood as a mammal, as a
(20:33):
vampire bat? And then what could that possibly tell us
about how it might work for a human um? And uh,
it's a lot of this is chemical. Um, the vampire
bat makes a small cut and laps, does not suck
the blood. And uh, while the average wound inflicted by
a vampire bat would likely stop bleeding in one to
(20:53):
two minutes, they are key ingredients in the vampire bats
saliva that interfere with clotting for several hours. So you
you're talking about really a complex chemical cocktail in the saliva.
So yeah, we would definitely have to assume that any
kind of vampire, uh, humanoid sized vampire would also be
(21:13):
producing an anticoagulant. That's right. I wonder if they get
I haven't watched enough of like True Blood or anything
like that, but I wonder if they get into that
with those shows. I do not remember from all my
time watching True Blood. Um. Now, now, some people, some
experts also speculate that there's often a pain killing and
or skin softening enzyme in the saliva as well as
(21:35):
the bat will lick before they bite. So again, the
saliva is it's just a cocktail of essential blood drinking
chemicals and that they lick, they cut, then they lap
it up and those times work very similar to that
nectivore I was describing that. It's just kind of like this,
uh conveyor belt. It's just like working like a piston.
(21:57):
The way that it licks. When you watch the slow
motion videos of these things, it's kind of stunning. Yeah,
it causes that this movement causes the blood to flow
along a pair of grooves on the bottom of the
tongue and into the mouth. There's even a cleft in
the lip that allows the flow of blood. And wasn't
there like a period of time where some scientists thought
that that U the flaps on their nose, we're what
(22:18):
we're making the cuts themselves and things. Yeah, there, yeah,
there was, But of course it turns out that all
most of that has to do with that called location
has nothing to do with feeding. But but yeah, if
you're just looking at these these crazy looking or gamy
back faces, you could I can imagine one producing that
theory like, oh those look kind of sharp. Maybe they
(22:38):
kind of slashed their face back and forth in a
open a vein. So again, think of this though, is
as a heist. It's really a high stakes heist for
the vampire back um so that they're they're absorbing, Uh,
they're taken in this blood and absorption of the of
the of the water that makes up the ingested blood.
This carrious to the kidneys, noon to the bladder for excretion.
(23:02):
So they may have to fly off at any moment
when that cow begins to wake up, wake up and
they're peeing. Yeah, because they're having to process this in
real time that a sudden weight gain could be lethal.
Can't carry a one out around that much useless water,
so it needs to just pass it as quickly as possible. Um,
So these cows are getting back golden showers at the
same time. You can put it that way. Yeah, there's
(23:23):
that they end up having to to urinate a little
as they're feeding. Um approximate and approximately the blood volume
consume is excreted as urine in the first hour after feeding,
so again you gotta you gotta get rid of the
useless water as quickly as possible, and still at the
same time, there's a constant dehydration risk because we're talking
about a lot of urine here, and mammals break down
(23:45):
amino acids into uria in order to prevent the toxic
build up of ammonia. The vampire batch digestive system cranks
up more and more with feeding to eliminate the waste,
but in doing so, this is just constant risk of dehydration.
So they're just constantly one step ahead of the hydration,
which is another reason that you you only find vampire
bats and very very moist envied Okay, And that's uh
(24:09):
somewhat similar to what we talked about when we looked
at the science of the strain, Right you remember, the
vampires in the strain are just like I think, as
they're feeding, they're constantly emitting ammonia or something like that, right,
as like a waste product. And that's I haven't watched
a lot of the TV, so I don't think they
tracked them that way, and I think they do that
in the TV show. Don't they like they tracked the
(24:30):
ammonia stains with like UV lights or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I believe they do, and that that would fit in
nicely with this with the research here del Toro once
again looking at his anatomical manuals. Yeah so um so. Again,
it just comes back to this idea that that it's
a very very high risk fringe lifestyle that the vampire
bat is left with. They can't really store up a
(24:52):
lot of fat. They can't. This another reason you don't
find vampire bats and cold environments. They can't. They can't
se question themselves away for the winter and a cave
because they constantly have to get that blood. They're more
like a hunting bird than a true carnivore. If only
vampire bats could keep thralls, if they could keep like,
like uh, like maybe a mouse sized thrall in their
(25:15):
nest and they just drink a little bit here and there.
But the problem is they have to drink so much, right, Yeah, indeed,
if they could do something like they need a lot
of thralls. Yeah, they would need a lot of thralls
or set up some sort of honeybee environment where they're
they're essentially making like blood honey and storing it away.
I like that. Maybe they'll get there one day, but
for now, we we've got this earth vampire bats. Yeah. Well,
(25:37):
that actually leads pretty nicely into uh, what really brought
us into talking about this. We're gonna take a quick break,
but when we come back, we're going to talk about
a brand new study that looks at the physics of
how we would drain blood from a human being if
they were our vampick Thrall. Alright, we're back, and we
(26:04):
had so far we're looking at we're trying to imagine
a humanoid vampire. We're looking at an emaciated, stealthy nonsperrato
that slips into your bedroom, licks your neck with us,
and then with a strange groove tongue, then slices it
with a specialized tooth and then lapse up the blood
before and peas a little bit before slinking away into
the night. But how long does this non sperato in
(26:27):
question have to fee? Well, the answer has been discovered,
and it was actually just discovered last fall, and uh,
actually Robert has written about it already. We were inspired
by this. We both saw the study on the same day.
Oh no, actually, you found it, did I? Oh, I
was the one who found that. You were the one
who felt okay, and we we we have pitch meetings
here and at the beginning of the week we both
(26:49):
pitched the story and then the uh you know, our
editor said, you guys gotta do this, and I said, well,
it's monster science. That's Robert. Robert's gonna do the vampire
long as we get to do it for the podcast.
And I ended up writing about Batman Superman did about
the various Superman Vatman uh interactions, So you got the
bat kind of a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So but
(27:11):
that was the inspiration for us to dive into this
because we said, this study is so cool, let's extrapolated
outwards and really look at the physics of it. And
turns out a lot of people have done research into this,
so let's talk about this study. Yeah. This comes to
us from the University of Leicester in the UK. It
was published in the Journal of Physics Special Topics. Uh,
and it's a whole team of researchers here worked on it.
(27:33):
They decided to just weigh in on just how much
blood a human vamppire would drink and how long it
would take them to drink, because I don't think this
is anything anyone really uh put a lot of thought
to in the past. But there are you know, there
there are going to be limits here. I hope people
making vampire movies and television going forward to take this
science into account and use it in their calculations, including
(27:56):
the mathematics that we'll talk about after this too, because
there's a large your game at play here. But let's
we're gonna zoom right in and look at a vampire
lord and their thrall. Premise here being that you don't
want to just drain your thrall dry, right, You want
to keep them on hand so that you've got a
constant tap of blood available. Yeah, you want to be
able to come back. However often I'm guessing, uh, you know,
(28:20):
if you're going by like blood donation standards, it's gonna
be over a month between visits if they're playing by
the rules. Yeah. Well, and that's assuming that this humanoid
sized vampire doesn't have to drink as much blood uh
comparative to its body weight as a vampire bat does.
Otherwise they just have like a basement full of people
(28:41):
that they're drinking from constantly, right, So the first thing
they had to decide is, yeah, how much, um, how
much blood are they going to drink? And so, based
on information from the American College of Surgeons Advanced Trauma
Life Support or a t l S program, the researchers
figure that that amount would be about of your blood volume. Technically,
(29:01):
that is that that's the upper limit of a class
one hemorrhage. So hey, if your thraw out there, do
not let your vampiric overlord talk you into a class
to hemorrhage. That's over unless he's willing to make good
on his promise. And actually the gist here is that
it's similar to the vampire bat scenario in that the
(29:21):
percent is from the model that a vampire would be
able to drink enough secretly, uh that you wouldn't notice
and it would be able to get away. So like,
maybe it sneaks into your bedroom at night and it
just like opens a vein and it starts going is
the cap before your heart rate starts to change and
you would notice effects on your circulatory system. Uh. And
(29:43):
in particular, the model for this study, they have their
vampires specifically drinking from the external kartid artery. And they've
also modeled the A order and coatid arteries as being
smooth tubes when the assumed air pressure of one standard
atmospheric pressure unit. So obviously this is not uh true
(30:04):
to life, right, Like, we don't all have perfectly smooth
tubes with the exact perfect atmospheric pressure in it. But hey,
we got to solve these problems somehow. So, as we
previously mentioned, they decided to go with the bat model
of blood drinking makes more sense than looking mosquitoes, right,
they were looking at free flowing lapping as we've discussed,
rather than sucking from a pair of point five millimeter
(30:26):
neck punctures. And then they calculated the average diameter of
the orda and the five connected arteries, as well as
blood pressure and the heart driving velocity of the flowing blood.
So they really got into the biology and the fluid
mechanics of the whole. But they didn't They didn't factor
in anti coagulants, So this is assuming that there's no
anti coagulant chemical applied by the vampire. Interesting, I didn't
(30:48):
notice that during my first read of this. Now, a
few equations later, the researchers determined this that any self
respecting vampire needs six point four minutes to drain a
polite point seven five liters of blood from his earth draw.
So to put that in perspective, it takes less than
an hour to give point four seven leaders during a
(31:10):
blood drive where they take eight of your blood. Yeah,
but they don't drink any of it. I know they drink. Well,
we don't know. I mean they might be that's what
those curtains are there. Yeah, I mean, in a sense
it is. If it is used, it is it becomes
a part of another person. So it's as well in
a sense it's it's concerned. Now, these results are based
(31:33):
on a couple of mathematical assumptions that the people doing
the research made specifically about human biology. So I'm gonna
run through these real quick. The first one is that
the five arteries that split out of our a orda
have total even thickness, which you know, I doubt that's true,
and everybody the diameter of the aorta is four centimeters,
(31:54):
which is that's known as the known carotid artery diameter. Right.
That seems big to me. You think about that four centimeters.
I guess that makes sense, but it's a major highway to. Uh.
The velocity of blood coming out of your a or
to has a mean speed not not like means speed,
but at average speed of point one milliseconds. Uh. The
(32:15):
internal arteries have a point five centimeter diameter. The average
human blood pressure would be one millimeters of mercury, and
the average density of whole blood is one thousand sixty
kms per cubic meter at room temperature. So they thought
of it all, uh, and they calculated it out based
(32:35):
on the average human body having a total of five
liters of blood inside of it. Okay, alright, so that
gives us, uh, that gives us some you know physics
grounding on exactly how much blood is gonna be taken,
how long uh it takes to consume it. Yeah, so
to crunch that at six point four minutes, that scene,
(33:00):
I mean, I guess, like maybe I'm a light sleeper,
but that seems to me like I would notice, um,
but you you know, like I'm thinking, no s Feratu style,
like sneaks into the room and there's a a woman
whose neck is is just a positioned just the right way. Um,
I don't know. Maybe they just don't notice. Yeah, I mean,
as long as she didn't have a neck pillow or anything,
(33:21):
or if she's you know, she's sleeping under the covers
completely and neck pillows like modern enemy of Vampires never
even thought about that, Yeah, because he can't very well
just pull that off, right. So all right, that's the
micro version of it, right of how the drinking of
the blood would work on one vampire on one human
(33:42):
if they were trying to drink it real quick, get
away with it without getting caught, or just have a
thrall on hand and keep them alive. Let's broaden this
a little bit. So we turned to Anissa Mary Ramia,
who is at the University of Ottawa in eleven and
for a mathematic model ling of infectious diseases class, wrote
(34:03):
the paper vampires do they want to suck our blood?
And I want to I want to take an aside
here to say I was disappointed in you, and I
am disappointed in Ramia for spelling want with a W.
It should have been do they vant to suck our blood?
Because that would have that would have been because I
believe you had the do they want to suck our blood?
Or want to suck your blood in the title of
(34:25):
the original piece of the story we just talked about, Okay,
so Ramya's goal here was to use mathematical models to
deduce whether vampires could exist. In particular, could we as
human beings live alongside a creature who wants to suck
our blood? So is it a sustainable creature? Yeah? So
(34:46):
she looks at she proposes several models and I'll present
them here, and she uses theoretical data based off of
the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So she's working
off of some of the premises within that mythos, because
you know, vampire mythos varies from yeah you gotta you
gotta choose one and if you gotta go with one,
I guess it seems like a pretty good one. Yeah.
(35:08):
So um, she starts with the first model that was
actually written by somebody else. It was written by Dr
Sohan Gandhi and Dr Costas J. I'm gonna butcher this
name ft the EMU sure sorry, uh cost Us. Anyways,
that they had this really cool paper called Ghosts, Vampires
(35:28):
and Zombies Cinema Fiction Versus Physics Reality. It was published
in Skeptical inquirer in seven and we're gonna call this,
or at least Ramia does the s V model. Okay,
this is the bare bones model. So going with statistics
that say that the present human population is six point
nine billion people in rising, these guys argued that vampires
(35:50):
never existed and could have never existed, because if they did,
the human race would have been wiped out in three years.
The way that they figured this out was by using
a mathematical concept called geometric progression, and this is used
to calculate the interest in economics and finance, or to
find the quantity of decaying radioactive elements in geology and physics.
(36:13):
So cool application of pre existing model. The constraint there
is that the world population is constant, so there's no
in their study, there's no birth rate or death rate fluctuations. Okay. Uh.
It also assumes that there is a constant rate that
vampires turn humans into other vampires, only doing so on
(36:34):
the first of each month. So I don't know why
that would be particularly the date. But so the vampires
have all gotten together and said, okay, we can only
do this on the first aga. Uh. And so this
susceptible population would decline over time, while the vampire population
would increase at the same time. At that rate, there
would be no humans left on Earth after three years. Now.
(36:57):
One of the obvious problems I've i've I've had when
I've encountered this kind of argument before is that you're
assuming the vampires are not making some efforts to keep
themselves from destroying each other. Because even if there is
you know, an unsustainable species, I mean, you can make
arguments that humans in our present form are also an
unsustainable species, and you know, and maybe we're doomed, but
(37:20):
also maybe we're able to stave off extinction by curbing
our self destructive tendencies at least a little bit. Yeah,
Ramya keeps adding complexities like that into the various models,
but she never gets to that one, which is, Yeah,
I like that idea. Like that, vampires, which are you know,
based off of our anatomy and our psychology and Russia,
(37:44):
would probably have as much in fighting as we humans do, right,
They wouldn't just all cooperate perfectly in order to drain
blood together? Yeah? Not surely. Not everybody gets the good
blood now, but not everybody gets to have as much
blood as they want. So she extrapolates their data out
to the second model, and this is the SVR model,
and it includes data for the rate that humans are turned,
(38:06):
the rate that humans are killed by vampire, as well
as the birth rate and the death rate uh, and
as well as all non human related death rates for vampires.
And that wasn't um extrapolated on other than I think
that that is just maybe it's vampire on vampire violence,
like you accidentally like walk into the sun or something
(38:30):
like that, UM, but there is She later does get
into human on vampire violence and how that would factor
into it. So her next one, and this is a
the SVR plus model. This is her third model. UH.
It's basically that humans are aware of the existence of
vampires and they actively hunt and kill them, and it's quantifiable.
(38:50):
There's a rate that we can quantify how fast humans
can kill vampires. So that would mean as an employed
vampire hunter in this scenario, you have a quota that
you're expected to hit it each month, and there's no
reason you shouldn't be able to hit it. And not
only that, not only are all the vampire hunters expected
to meet their quotas, but then there's also a slayer
(39:12):
that is more efficient at killing vampires than any of
the other hunters. So this is factoring in the Buffy
methods obviously. So that's on top of all of the
other data predictions in the mathematical models presented so far.
We had two more models to go. Oh, I really
hope one includes blade. Would be awesome if they're like
and then blades there, I think she would just she
(39:34):
would just be ice skating uphill with that one. All right,
we'll cut that little bit of awkwardness alright. So, yeah,
Model four does not include blade, but it adds in
the rationale that it's not in vampire's best interest to
turn every single human that they drink from, right, And
this kind of goes along with the other study that
we were just talking about with that drinking. So I
(39:55):
think we can assume that that's kind of how they're
working here. Uh. And the reasons why, well, there'd be
too many dead bodies that would arouse suspicion first of all,
but then there would also be an increase in the
competition for human blood resources, and then that's probably where
you get the in fighting between vampires. So it uses
parameters that in order to be turned. You have to
(40:17):
both be bitten by a vampire and then you subsequently
have to drink a vampire's blood and then you turn
into a vampire. Yes, and that's certainly the model we
see in a lot of vampire fictions. Yea. And the
last one, uh, she calls the predator prey model, and
this uses this as an actual population dynamic mathematical theory
(40:39):
called predator prey uh in. In biology, the idea that
the carrying capacity of a given environment is the maximum
number of a particular species that can be supported and
sustained indefinitely, given that food, water, and other necessities are
all available in that environment. And it was previously approached
(40:59):
by a guy named Dr Brian Thomas in two thousand
two in a paper called Vampire Population Ecology. So she
cleaned that up and applied it here. I love that
we are not the only ones who are hungry. No
pun intended for vampire science. Yeah, there's there's a legacy
here of of sort of epidemic consideration of vampires. So
(41:22):
the first case here represents that human and vampire populations
eventually go extinct. The second case that she shows are
when vampires are extinct but the human population hovers somewhere
near its carrying capacity. And the third case is where
human and vampire populations are capable of coexisting. And the
important thing to notice here is that the human equilibrium
(41:45):
population does not depend on its own carrying capacity. However,
the vampire population does depend on the human populations carrying capacity.
So basically, there needs to be a constant influx of
human population in order for vampires to have a sustainable
coexistence with us. Otherwise we go back to scenario number
(42:07):
one where they drink us dry in three years and
then what are they left with. It's like that movie
what is it called Daybreakers, the one with Ethan Hawk
where everybody is a vampire. Um. So, yeah, the human
population doesn't depend on its own caring capacity, the vampire
population does. We are not large enough to support a
vampire population. So I think by looking at this mathematical model,
(42:29):
we can deduce that there aren't vampires. Okay, maybe mathematically
you don't have to. You can take that neck pillow
off tonight. Nothing is going to drink your blood. Although
I will point out, and this is a note in
her actual paper, she says this does not take into
account quote large scale supernatural events like the apocalypse. So
(42:54):
she admits, look, there's not a lot of data here
for her to work with, but she's basing off the
TV show. Sure, if somebody out there wants to go
and watch every Buffy episode and note the frequency of
vampire encounters, feeds, kills, and turns, you can apply that
in these models and extrapolate the data outward. And well,
what I like about these studies is they kind of
give you a starting point and from there you can
sort of tweak the vampire mythos to make it more
(43:15):
sustainable or more believable, or throw in certain behaviors or safeguards.
They're they're gonna help it make sense. This is what
I feel like del Toro did. Yeah, he maybe didn't
sit down with these mathematical models, but like they think
of stuff like this in that show, you know the
practicalities of a vampire invasion, especially upon New York. Yeah,
and also looking at it in the strain, Uh, looking
(43:36):
at it too is what you can have the organism,
and then you're gonna have sort of offshoots and mutations
that can be less sustainable and therefore our risk to
both the humans and the established vampires well. By applying
these models, she concluded that if an outbreak of vampires
were to break out in an area like say Sunnydale, California,
(43:58):
where people were generally really aware and there was a
slayer involved, and this is not counting hell Mouth, she said,
no supernatural events exactly, it would be less likely uh
than an endemic that would occur in a population like
somewhere like where she lives, Ottawa. Uh. And she says, look,
there's no slayer in the population, and Ottawa is generally
(44:19):
unaware of vampires, so it might be a problem there.
But she takes into account and this is where it
gets crazy. She applies what she calls the g factor
to a locale and this is how much garlic is
in particular areas. And the way that she does this
is she takes Google Maps and she plots out all
the swarm of shops that are in Ottawa, and she
(44:44):
scientifically says that the reasons the scent of garlic would
make it difficult for vampires to navigate through a populated
area are because of these swarmer shops. She plots it
on the map and then she even gives each store
an effective radius and The way that she mathematically computes
this radius is based on the rating of the restaurant,
it's popularity and therefore how much garlic you could assume
(45:08):
is in each diners system after they leave. So as
they're leaving the restaurant, they're creating this radius because they've
got like a certain amount of garlic in their blood
and on their lips, and that the vampires would smell
that and basically like veer away from it. Okay, So
there are certain there there would be certain cuisines that
and and therefore certain geographical regions the vampires would just
(45:30):
have to avoid, Like they just could not go to Italy.
They are parts of China, they would not be able
to get a firm foothold, and they have to really
go to those Icelandic countries. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And she
finally recommends she doesn't break down the math on this,
but she says, you know what might also be a
good idea is bless all the bodies of water in town.
That way, it would make it difficult for the vampires
(45:51):
to cross them. Uh, And I think they don't they
do something to that effect in uh in the strain
or is it just that they can't cross moving bodies. Yeah,
they plan it at Which is another which is an
often overlooked a little detail from the Vampire Folklores is
that they can't cross moving bodies of water, and they
I think they play into the strain that it might
have something to do with like essentially their little worms
(46:14):
something like that. Yeah, and I think, if I remember correctly,
I hope this isn't a spoiler for the TV show
that the way they get away with it isn't what
they just like hop on the back of like subway
trains that are going underneath the rivers. And yeah, well
you know another bit from from Vampire Folklores that's rarely explored,
certainly in the scientific literature, but also in fiction is
(46:35):
the idea that they're obsessed with with knots and uh
and like intricate fabrics. I think the only bit of
fiction that I've seen it used in UH is habit.
I don't know if you know when Larry Fresden, I believe, No,
I don't know this one, Okay, yeah, it's it was
an old indie picture, kind of a slight like nineties
(46:56):
indie remake of Dracula, but very much a in be
filmed with an indie vibe, and there's a scene where
the vampire is transfixed by you know, some sort of
knotted fact. Interesting, so they're just like constantly tying their shoes. Yeah,
what's the situation is that if you want to VAMPI
you want to protect yourself from a vampire, just hang
like an intricate knot or some sort of woven thing
(47:17):
outside of your house. The vampire will come to it
and then they're just transfixed by it and they start
messing around with it. Then the sun comes up in
their toes. I wonder if that's connected to knots of garlic. Oh,
I don't know. Maybe maybe just double up on the
hunt exactly. Yeah. Well that's it. We got vampire math,
vampire physics, vampire evolution. I think we've figured it out.
(47:38):
So what do you think vampires possible? H me? Uh, well,
so certainly if we based some of those hypotheses for
vampire bats off of human humanoid vampires, you know, maybe
they were drinking blood off of mega fauna and they
but then they went into the shadows. They've been sneaking
(47:58):
that fifteen percent off of us for a long time now.
But the only way that they would be able to
get away with it is if they kept themselves in
check with that fifteen percent. Otherwise, Uh, they would either
kill the entire human race or we would figure out
that they're there and we would hunt them down. Yeah,
they for them to exist, it would just be this
very stealthy, very strategic and and just and also just
(48:20):
very dangerous position. Um, you know, like the vampire bats.
It would just be it's a heist with high stakes
and they have to they have to carry it out
just so in order to avoid capture and extermination. Well,
I'm gonna sleep better tonight. I'm probably gonna sleep better
than I have since I was a little kid and
I saw that episode of The Amazing Spider Man that
we're Dracula showed up. So um, thank you to the
(48:43):
scientists involved in all this research. Yes, we can all
put aside our garlic knight pill lives tonight. All right.
So so there you have it. Hey, if you want
more on this topic other topics, go to stuff about
your mind dot com. That's where we'll find a landing
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There you'll also find links out to our various social
(49:05):
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And if you're a vampire and you have a secret
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at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com.
(49:33):
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