Halloween 2024: Understanding Nature's "Vampires"

Written by Jonathan Wojcik

  


This may come as a surprise to you, but I also have a mild obsession with blood-sucking animals. It's true! There was this one time I named an entire website after one of them, and I continued running that website for over two decades of my life! But why do I love blood-sucking animals? I promise you, it's not to be edgy on purpose. Affection for flesh-eating animals is common enough that we don't even seem to question it; wolves, sharks, tigers, raptors as in the modern flying dinosaurs, raptors as in the extinct not-so-flying dinosaurs, crocodiles and tyrannosaurids, among countless others, are all regarded as cool, exciting, or even beautiful and regal to mainstream human culture. And I suppose that's easy enough to rationalize; eviscerating a gazelle and slurping the gore from its skeleton isn't exactly glamorous when you get right down to it, not really any more than an herbivore chewing, swallowing, barfing and re-chewing the same plant matter until their body is finally satisfied with what a rank fart they've turned it into, but we as a species really like "powerful" and "dangerous" things. We like predators the same way some people like famous murderers, except the predators can't help it, so it isn't as weird.

I suppose I can understand why nature's "vampires" aren't as easily romanticized, as much as I might not agree. They're smaller and weaker than their prey, relying on pure stealth to take what they need from the host and return to hiding before they can be stopped. I suppose, judging by other cultural trends, that this more closely resembles some kind of treacherous burglar or sleazy stalker than our image of the Noble and Mighty Hunter. It's ostensibly closer to the cowardly and craven sort of nemesis who sneaks poison into your food, instead of the brave and honorable one who announces their presence and decapitates you with a samurai sword. I can see it, really, that difference between a frightening death and more drawn out "body horror," or a sense that having your blood drawn by a tiny bug without your consent is more "violating" than simply having your neck snapped by a giant roaring kitty cat.

But from an evolutionary perspective, what some might anthropomorphise into that amoral, violating "cowardice" is also more sustainable, to both the hunter and the hunted, representing many novel and sophisticated adaptations towards a more balanced, non-lethal alternative to traditional predation. What forms do these adaptations take? How are they used? And what are they "for" in the overall scheme of nature? Well, I suppose we should start with some of those that almost everybody loathes the most, and continue from there to some that hardly anyone hates, only because the average person simply hasn't even heard of them. -------

So just what is the unique appeal of all this creatures, for me personally? We've talked about their ecological value and technically "kinder" brand of predation, but my own fascination with nature's hemophiliacs definitely began before I could really appreciate them from that complex ecological angle. If I have to psychoanalyze myself, I'm sure I've admitted before that I'm more squeamish about bleeding than you probably expect from either a grown man or horror fan, and that when I was just a teeny little child, that "squeamishness" was closer to a panic-inducing phobia. A speck of blood, so much as a single tiny red dot of it in a cartoon drawing, had me screaming bloody murder as surely as if I walked in on literal bloody murder. I still don't know why that was ever the case, but I certainly wasn't immune to the allure of those mighty, murderous meat-eaters I was just on about, so maybe my developing brain slotted those sleazy, spineless sanguivores into the same column because both of them were, to my mind at the time, equally terrifying?

On the other hand, it was never any more difficult for me to see something lovable in traditionally adorable herbivores, either, or the very plants they eat, or fungi, or protists, or literally just anything at all that's alive. The fact that living things come in all of these categories, with all kinds of wacky body parts and behavioral patterns to facilitate these lifestyles, has always and continues to just thrill me to bits. Maybe I just have a special love of the vampires and parasites because so much of our society doesn't see them as just as another charming flavor of woodland critter? Maybe their image as ghoulish and disgusting gives them an "underdog" appeal to me, the same way I might feel for a tiny dog nobody wants just because it bites and it stinks and always looks like it just rolled in its own barf even in those rare times that it hasn't. That is an objectively unpleasant dog, but doesn't the thought tug at your heart a little, anyway?

Maybe it's also that I do see what's so "unwholesome" about these creatures, but that's also its own special kind of entertainment, like the fictional character you can't help but love for their unapologetically toxic characteristics. That guy (or far too rarely, gal) in that anime or webcomic or video game whose entertainment value overshadows every other character entirely because they're a lying, cheating, pathetic, slovenly scumbag you would never actually want to touch without gloves on.

I guess it might really be all of the above, for me. If nature is a cast of characters, natural "vampires" from moths to finches are all at once sort of like gothic monsters, sympathetic rejects, conniving sleazes and misunderstood antiheroes.

WAYS YOU CAN SUPPORT THIS SITE!

MORE HALLOWEEN FEATURES:

EMAIL ADMIN!

BACK TO BOGLEECH.COM!

comments powered by Disqus