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A fellow graduate student sent me a paper entitled Vampire Population Ecology. This is written by Brian Thomas, a PhD student at Stanford, and uses real population ecology equations to map out the carrying capacity of the vampire population in Sunnydale, given the predation on the predator population by human (ie. Slayers and the like).
Basically: What is the ratio of vampires to humans in Sunnydale, that lets the town continue to exist. This is an important question for anyone who's actually given any thought to the vampire population dynamics in the Buffy verse - or really, any vampire universe. Because with the number of throwaway vamps in the show, and the significantly high death rate among the population, why isn't Sunnydale a ghost town?
This paper carefully uses canon facts and educated estimates to figure that out.
The conclusion:
In my search for similar topics, I came across this blog post, by Laura McLay that claims that any kind of vampire population would have exploded and taken over the planet ages ago.
But she uses Twilight as her basis of vampire behaviour, so her base assumptions are already off (unless we're going with the theory of 'sparkly' vampires - personally, I like Spike better).
My final piece of academic research is the article Convex-concave utility function: Optimal blood-consumption for vampires by Richard F. Hartl and Alexander Mehlmann. This was published in the journal Applied Mathematical Modelling in 1983, and makes me wish I was a researcher back then because damn, the stuff they could get away with publishing before the internet existed.
Finally: Science Is Fun!!! (And I am a huge geek.)
Other Links:
BoingBoing post - has a decent discussion and links
The Oyster's Garter - brief intro/debate between the Twilight and Buffy analyses
Basically: What is the ratio of vampires to humans in Sunnydale, that lets the town continue to exist. This is an important question for anyone who's actually given any thought to the vampire population dynamics in the Buffy verse - or really, any vampire universe. Because with the number of throwaway vamps in the show, and the significantly high death rate among the population, why isn't Sunnydale a ghost town?
This paper carefully uses canon facts and educated estimates to figure that out.
The conclusion:
What we get is an equilibrium human population of 36,346, and an equilibrium vampire population of around 18. Holy cow! We just about nailed the human population, and the number of vampires certainly fits with the number you might expect, assuming that at any given time there is a lair or two thatBuffy doesn’t know about yet.
In my search for similar topics, I came across this blog post, by Laura McLay that claims that any kind of vampire population would have exploded and taken over the planet ages ago.
The vampire population would either explode or die out, depending on the expected number of offspring per vampire. But if you take into account the fact that vampires live many, many generations (they’re virtually immortal) and may create thousands of offspring, the population explodes (if you assume that each vampire creates at least one vampire, on average, before it dies). With those numbers, vampires would not be living under the radar–they would be everywhere!
But she uses Twilight as her basis of vampire behaviour, so her base assumptions are already off (unless we're going with the theory of 'sparkly' vampires - personally, I like Spike better).
My final piece of academic research is the article Convex-concave utility function: Optimal blood-consumption for vampires by Richard F. Hartl and Alexander Mehlmann. This was published in the journal Applied Mathematical Modelling in 1983, and makes me wish I was a researcher back then because damn, the stuff they could get away with publishing before the internet existed.
A dyanmic control model of confrontation between vampire-predators and human-preys has been developed in Hart1 and Mehlmann’s6 paper on the Transylvanian problem of renewable resources.
Finally: Science Is Fun!!! (And I am a huge geek.)
Other Links:
BoingBoing post - has a decent discussion and links
The Oyster's Garter - brief intro/debate between the Twilight and Buffy analyses
