Zombie Rat

I have been watching the show iZombie, and have so far found it to be a rather enjoyable experience. It is just serious enough, spiked with quite a bit of comedy.

WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD

Ok, that’s out of the way. So for those of you who are reading this, you either have been watching and know everything, or don’t care.

In the show, the main character and her boss are trying to cure zombieism. To experiment, they test to see what conditions will turn a rat into a zombie. With one successful rat, they now have a zombie vermin that broke out of its cage and ate the brains of the other rats in the experiment.\

Typical zombie behavior.

Now comes the fun part. The boss, Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti, gets bitten by the rat. We get a few fun scenes where he is testing himself to see if he is going to become a zombie. The eventual answer is no. So we have determined that zombieism does not cross between species.

This got me thinking. A zombie rat is a great pest removal system. They are stronger and faster than normal rats. They can go everywhere a normal rat goes. They will not pass their zombieism onto any unlucky humans that get bit, which is more than can be said for other diseases rats carry.

Assuming the disease doesn’t mutate, a handful of zombie rats would wipe out a rat population pretty quickly. There is no verdict yet on whether or not they can breed, but my money would say no. This means that once they run out of food, they are the only rats left, and there will be no new generation. They will eventually breakdown from lack of food, or be killed off by predators/people. Assuming the disease doesn’t jump species, which we have evidence against so far, then you have a rat free city until some outsiders move in.

#iZombie #geekery

About the Author:

Stephen Mayo lives in Montana with his wife, daughter, and three cats.

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