Computer modeling of vampire ecologies

[roseembolism]

When I was in college the first time, we had a neat ecological simulator that ran on the primitive Mac's we used. It charted the ecological balance between deer, wolves, and the carrying capacity of the area, and it was really tricky to find parameters that resulted in an even set of population increases and decreases, not a population explosion and die-off of both deer and wolves.   Too many wolves or too few deer, and the wolves eat all the deer, and die off.  Too many deer or too few  wolves, and the deer would multiply past teh carrying capacity, then die out, and the wolves would follow.  Bummer.

Those programs are still around, and even more sophisticated. Sophisticated enough that they can compute pressing questions like: how many vampires can Sunnydale sustain?

There's basically two models: the Twilight model, and the Buffy model.  Not surprisingly, the Twilight model assumes vamps are an apex predator, and interestingly enough, ANY number of vampires will result in the vampire population exploding.  This means the maximum number of allowable Twilight vampires is zero.  With the Buffyverse model however, the vamps have a snarky teenager hunting them in turn, and with a jiggling of parameters, you get a sustainable population of vamps/humans/slayer: 36,346 humans, 18 vampires, 1 Slayer.  Which seems to add up to the numbers in Buffy pretty well.

Isn't computer modeling neat?

Comments

[deirdremoon.livejournal.com]

GEEK. :)

[fintach.livejournal.com]

Yeah! What she said!

Anyway, I certainly wasn't sitting here wondering about the mathematics of the underlying model and whether or not they'd considered the attrition rate of vampires among their own and they disagreed and competed and . . . I'll just be moving along then, shall I?

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

*nodnod* And I totally did not just forward that link to my Ecology&Evolution professor. :)

[mithriltabby]

There’s also the Moonlight model, where you get hunted down by your fellow vampires if you start acting so indiscreet as to possibly reveal the existence of vampires to the public.

[seawasp]

It occurs to me that this neglects the idea that as the population of vampires increases, the prey suddenly become predators. This inversion does not happen with deer -- they don't suddenly realize they need to kick ass. It is, however, endemic with human beings, who are omnivores and nasty bastards.

[racerxmachina.livejournal.com]

Though "Bambi the Wolf Slayer" has potential, not to mention thematic consistency.