#THERE ARE HORROR STORIES OF PET TARANTULAS GETTING EATEN BY MEALWORMS

[rxttenfish]

Vampire hater? I that vampires were objectively perfect metaphors for predators?

I've always thought there was a lot of fun stuff they can be used for. Can your tirade be today?

lol. lmfao. i think vampires remain god awful metaphors for predators the second you know anything about predation or how it happens in nature.

okay lets start with the parasite bit because thats easier for me. parasitism is also a little bit of a... non-definition too, and technically is just another form of predation too (much like how we should probably define herbivores as predators too because plants are alive and just as alive as animals and the actual mechanics of herbivory is better understood that way but Oh Well i cant even get people to understand that reptiles are alive so plants are a no-go), so all im really talking about is disputing a certain idea of how they behave as predators. for the purposes of this, lets define parasitism as a form of predation that consumes prey in units of less than one.

for one, in a significant chunk of media, a vampire preying on a human usually kills that human. im assuming for this that the amount of blood they need is just equivalent to one human, rather than getting into the supernatural weeds of why this kills the human. you could also just assume the vampire is incompetent and dispatches the prey due to not know how to feed on blood and NOT, but thats bad for the species if all vampires do that.

this is BAD for a parasite. parasites do not actually want to kill their hosts. why would they? for most parasites, the host is not only their source of food but their HOUSE, their source of everything in the world. sure, never leaving the host makes reproduction a complicated mess, but thats the price you pay for getting literally everything handed to you on a silver platter. a parasite is not designed to leave the host, or not for long, and usually makes use of intermediate hosts to do so anyways, minimizing non-host time. did you know most parasites dont actually have any adaptations to manage their body temperature? because if they live inside a host body, then they can just use the hosts body temperature in the first place, nice and perfect for them.

high parasite loads in single hosts are not actually good for the parasite, anyways. anything that effects host health isnt good for the parasite, actually, because they run on such a fine line of "host is healthy and happy = even better food and house for me!" and "host cannot be TOO healthy and happy, because then their immune system has an even better chance to kick me out and kill me (at the same time ofc)"

vampires that just... kill their host upon first contact with said host are not being very good parasites. theyre bad parasites actually. why are you burning your own fields. the blood comes BACK.

but this is when you say, ah! but what if theyre like mosquitos and vampire bats and other forms of parasites that dont live inside their hosts body!

one, you still have the issue of STOP KILLING YOUR DAMN HOSTS. stop removing food sources for yourself in the future!!! but also, theres a reason vampire bats are so fucking weird for deciding to become obligate sangivores as tetrapods, and its because blood is a pretty shitty source of nutrition. its high in certain things, sure, but also it is crucially missing several different things necessary for life to Function, and this is a pretty extreme way to live if you cant just find ways around that. ie: is a vertebrate.

lack of detection is also the name of the game here. you do not want your prey to even notice that you are there, you do not want them to dislodge you, you want to get in and get out. why are you being the exact same fucking size as your prey. thats how you get immediately noticed. and you LOOK like how your prey looks???? in a social animal???? good job getting marked as 1. OUTSIDER TO INSIDE GROUP and 2. POTENTIAL THREAT. theres so much back and forth, pros and cons, competition and collaboration, in social species, that you shouldnt get wrapped up in that if you can help it (which you shouldnt, because you are trying to eat these people, not have your own feeding attempt thwarted because they pulled you into their social dramas and now you cant get close enough to any of them without getting noticed or possibly attacked anyways)

honestly the size thing is one of the big things for me. it makes no sense. theres a reason predators as a rule are smaller than the prey that they hunt, and thats because the 10% rule of tropic levels still applies here. you are operating at an energy deficit. the energy it takes to capture and kill and feed and digest (because you have to have energy to even begin eating something!! even if you dont catch it yourself!! digestion consumes energy!!!) something the size of a human will NOT be made up for by the energy you get from that human if you are ALSO the same size as a human. you are so much more likely to get caught and found out (and no i do not care how op your vampires are, getting outnumbered is far more powerful in real life than it has ever been in fiction because fiction solely runs on "rule of cool" and it kills me when people then try to apply it to real life) (see also: STOP KILLING YOUR SOURCE OF FOOD YOU IDIOTS) (YOU DO NOT GO INTO THE FIELD AND START KILLING ALL OF YOUR HERD OF COWS BECAUSE ONE BULL GORED SOMEONE) (YOU HAVE TO EAT TOO) and to have your feeding attempt botched if you are the size of a human. theres a reason all the sangivores we have are all fractions of a size of the animals that they feed on, AND this is already counting sangivores who eat OTHER stuff too (a lot of blood-feeding insects will also be important pollinators who eat nectar!! vampire bats are weird by only eating blood!!!)

theres also the issue of timing. vampires ALWAYS eat way more often than they should. like, okay, blood is garbage food and it has no fat meaning no extra stores of energy to prevent immediate starvation if you miss one feeding. but these are also animals that are taking a little bit of blood from an animal far larger than them who will not miss that amount of blood taken. they can afford to double-dip, because they arent killing their prey. sure, they can kill their prey in massive swarms, but not only does this primarily effect the young/small/weak and less so for the adults (a fair enough price to pay, babies are cheap and animals always seem to have a higher mortality in their early life than adulthood), but also this is a pretty rare situation to begin with and the bust/boom suggested would be beneficial enough alone to make up for the cost of these losses.

but no. vampires are killing their prey, they have to take a large amount of blood at once (one whole human the same size as them), and they only specialize into ONE TYPE OF PREY. yes, i know theres recent talk of vampires who eat animals, but no. im going pop vampire, the vampire that most people will first think of when thinking of a vampire, basic as shit.

humans are bad prey, okay? this is what all these stories dont understand. humans are really, really bad prey. first of all, we are apex predators to begin with (do not come at me and argue with me about this, an apex predator is literally just one of the largest predators in its ecosystem, can (not necessarily will) eat nearly any other type of animal in said ecosystem, and is rarely predated upon as adults. lions and bears and tigers and sharks are all regularly eaten by other animals when they are cubs. like i said. infant mortality is universally pretty high), so thats a bad call. even in cases of maneaters that exist, theyre nearly all animals that have had their natural form of living interrupted in some way. habitation is the least damaging option (aka why you need to STOP FEEDING THE WILDLIFE), but also if the animal is injured, or sick, or very old, or nursing cubs. aka, all the cases where we would expect an animal to start taking on riskier prey that cannot pan out. the lions of tsavo could not eat their regular prey due to injury and already were feeding off of bodies left behind by the human atrocities of the railroad being constructed. humans both remember and hold grudges. this is a bad strategy, and vampires have made the fatal mistake of absolutely needing to be in absolutely tiny populations just to make the numbers work and also being large enough to actively target. you cannot squish every mosquito, but one vampire already requires such a massive population to support them that you can easily drive them to localized extinction by just killing one.

which is another thing. if you are killing a human every time you eat, and you are eating often, then the humans are not replacing themselves. humans take at least 9 months to make another human, and even that is basically useless without a good decade and a half more of just waiting for them to grow up and get to a decent size which might then be useful for you. if you target the infants to begin with, then thats way less blood, not going to be enough, and youre going to make multiple kills in one night just to make up for that absence, and then some because you need even MORE to make up for the extra energy you just spent obtaining all of said infants. not to mention the time lag itll take for the same humans to make more humans to replace those, AND humans have a limited reproductive window to begin with. this is very bad if you have to eat more than once a week. hell, this is bad if youre even doing the regular predator thing of eating a single large prey maybe once a month (and they supplement their diet with other, smaller prey items to make up for the energy deficit). do you know how long it takes a wildebeest or a zebra to go from calf to reproductive adult? its not 18 years, okay.

and again i just sit here and fume thinking about every excuse made that vampires are using mimicry to look like humans to get close to them. first of all, thats not how most aggressive mimicry works. most aggressive mimicry is looking like something appetizing to your prey item, something it wants to get close to, or something it wouldnt even notice at all. usually if youre looking like a specific animal, its not actually FOR that animal, and aggressive mimicry to begin with is rarer than you think. the only example i can think of is the (small!!!!) fraction of ant-mimicking jumping spiders that do prey on ants, but not only is this rare due to how scary ants themselves are, but it cannot really be just copy + pasted onto humans, who have an entirely different reproductive setup and no queens that churn out hundreds of offspring a day (more than any spider could eat in the one single community of ants) and are mammalian megafauna that have extremely high energetic needs and physical effort required just to kill a single one of those bastards, let alone repeatedly doing it more than once, AND being obligated to navigate space in the same way that they do.

all of this is nonsensical because i am very sick right now so you know. unpolished vampire rant.

[royalreef]

@fstbmp​ inquired: I don't have anything in particular to ask but what's your Least favorite thing to see when sb writes Animals :tm: ?

(( Just because it’s been on my mind lately: treating animals as automatons.

I’ve seen this SO MUCH — where an animal is given A Stimulus and thus has to react in a given Response. You see this most with predators. They spot a prey animal, or see a threat, or there’s blood in the water, or WHATEVER, and they will immediately drop everything else that they’re doing to go chase something or kill something or what have you. They’ll also be loud and noisy and roar, even when hunting something, or when they burst out from an ambush, because the element of surprise is clearly not a factor here. I also like to call this “making animals stupid” because... it really does!

Predators, for instance, actually have a lot of factors that they weigh out when considering going after a prey item. The terrain, the weather, the season, the current availability of prey, the predator’s own bodily state, light vs dark, open vs cover, their own hunger and need, the species of prey, the predator’s memory, and so on and so forth. A predator knows when it’s hungry and when it’s not. A predator also knows if prey is rarer at a given time, or how much energy it’ll cost to kill and eat that prey item. There’s also the aspect of the age and health of the prey as well, because the reason that predators target the sick and the young and the old is not just because they’re easier, but because they can’t fight back as well. A lot of predators actually die to their prey, and a predator also knows that if a prey item injures them, then this likely means starvation and a slow death regardless. An injured predator can’t hunt, and there are no antibiotics in the wild.

It also entirely disregards an aspect of animals that is entirely glossed over in virtually all media: communication between different species.

This isn’t referring to specifically “talking” to another animal, but in the fact that animals are pretty good at loosely knowing what body language means. They can tell if another animal is behaving aggressively, or acting frightened, or if they’re hunting, or if they’re being calm. This is why so much advice on wild animals starts with “Don’t panic” — because you freaking out and flailing around also looks, to other animals, aggressive or defensive.

This is why you can see lions at watering holes calmly drinking beside their prey species — because they can tell that the lions aren’t hunting. This is also where you see the Clever Hans effect, because animals can tell when another animal is excited about something, and even moreso if you reward them for it.

And all of this is entirely disregarded in most media. A predator that’s fighting another predator will disregard the other completely to go chase after some humans. An animal will abandon its kill to chase after the smaller humans. An animal that is entirely relaxed and at a distance away from everyone else will quickly approach when it spots a human.

I think the most egregious example of this is actually the line of advice for bear attacks that goes “If it’s black, fight back, if it’s brown, lie down” which fundamentally misunderstands how bears work. Not only is there the issue of, both these species of bear can have black or brown coloration, but there’s the issue of bears don’t attack for no reason. A much more effective method is knowing WHY the bear is attacking and how it’s acting. Does it expect food from you, and is thus begging and acting unusually calm and lenient around humans? Is it aggressive and territorial, perhaps with cubs in the area? Is it one of the rare cases where it’s actually hunting and stalking you? Have you just gotten too close up in it’s business and just need to give it some space? Did you approach it or did it approach you? These are not behaviors nor traits that are limited by species, and CRUCIALLY alter what you should do in any given situation.

Alternatively, I think media is GREAT when it subverts this expectation. I haven’t seen the movie in specific, but there is a scene in one of the newer Kong movies where a character tries to make a heroic sacrifice, by having live explosives on his person and expecting the monster to eat him, that is all for naught when the monster then smacks him away.

And, while I will crucially remind you that I haven’t seen the rest of the movie, that scene alone was a GENIUS moment for me. This animal probably knows what explosives do at this point! It probably knows it’s big and loud and dangerous! It can probably smell them on him! An animal can recognize when another animal, even a prey animal, has something “wrong” with it and can then reject it or even smack it further away from itself!

I just hate it when people think and write animals as being totally unable to reason or weigh their current options, and instead just react to whatever’s put in front of them, and alternatively think it can be really fun when media understands that animals aren’t stupid.