Just to totally geek on this, it's worth noting that the vampire plays a role in this arithmetic, too, because the vampire has to choose to let the victim become a vampire. It's not just a simple equation of vampire bites = new vampire from victim; rather, the vamp has to let the mostly-drained victim feed upon the vampire to complete the transformation.

I'm sure there'd eventually have been a vampire bureaucracy which dictated which vampire could create X number of new vampires per year - probably at some point in the midst of the Renaissance. ;) It may well be that your calculatation of the holding population is correct, but you'd have to check with your local vampire actuary to be sure.

The biggest problem with this is that the starting assumptions don't match the observed behavior of vampires on Buffy. Specifically, vampires on the show don't automatically create new vamps every time they feed. Making new vamps is a deliberate act that involved both the vamp drinking blood from the human and the human drinking from the vamp. Most vamp victims just die and stay dead.

Among the main-character vampires (Angel, Spike, Drusilla, etc) making a human into a vampire seems to be something done very rarely -- once in several decades, if not centuries.

That said, it PERFECTLY fits the universe of Richard Matheson's I AM LEGEND, in which vampires take over the world until only one human being is left.

In the movie version THE OMEGA MAN, that lone man is played by Charlton Heston.

Therefore, the existence of vampires clearly means that Charlton Heston will be the last man alive, and then dead, with his gun not pry-able from his cold, dead hands.

I don't know how the vampires play out in the Buffy world, but do you take into account The Lost Boys/Salem's Lot Corollary, wherein if the "head" vampire of a given undead 'family tree' is killed, then his or her "offpsring" also die? (Or are they re-humanized? I forget...this is stretching the bounds of my nerdity.)

In any case, it should affect the math. Also vampires can drink the blood of sheep and whatnot, too.

In the Whedon-verse, we do not accept the Lost Boys sire-killing phenomenon. As stated above, the rate of reproduction is much lower than the study indicates as well.

In addition, since vampires are evil, they have to contend with not just the Slayer, but with other vampires, demons, their own stupidity, and a host of other non-slayer vampire hunters, to include representatives of the Watchers' Council. And after the season 7 finale there are hundreds of slayer-ized former potentials running around controlling the vampire population as well.

Worst of all for Vampires, they are drawn to areas of power like the Hellmouth, and tend to be a bit sloppy in matters of crime scene cleanup, so they tend to be localized and easy to find.

However, Buffy and the Scoobies also have to contend with other distractions like demons, spirits, magical artifacts and gods that seem to show up (on a weekly basis), not to mention keeping away from Johnny Law and the various government conspiracies that are on the lookout for sexy, super-strong vigilantes. So while they have far more advantages than this study would indicate, they also have plenty of things working against them.

But the nail in the coffin (or stake through the heart) for this study is the vampiric principle, which states that the study must be wrong since vampires do in fact exist. =-)

Yeah... This study is showing quite a lot of fawls... Like in many "scientific" works the author seems to have been picking up carefully the facts that were consistent with his theory...

One of the best examples of this para-science I read is "the science of discworld", only recomended to the fans of the discworld novels by Terry Pratchett. It's goal is to divulgate real science comparing the way things work in the real and fictional world (for example the speed of light). Funny (specially if you know the discworld novels) AND instructive!

Disregarding all points above (which are valid)
You have to consider that the time one bitten (wo)man takes to transform in a vampire is not zero.
In this weird logic, there should be a maturation time to teeth grow.

Excellent points all around!

One question: Is it really true that vampirization is so rare on Buffy? Certainly, the frequency with which vampires transform victims into vampires is quite rare *narratively* -- i.e. the number of times it happens as part of a storyline. But if it were as infrequent as once a decade or once a century, surely there would be far less vampires in the Buffy universe than there appear to be. I'd always suspected -- again, as a very cursory viewer of the show -- that there must be a lot of vampirization going on offscreen, all the time.

I think once each century per vamp sounds like too little, but it i s a fact (?) that siring (the act of turning a victime in to new vampire) is not something taken lightly by the vamp population. On the show it is implied that it is usually only done to people that the vampire likes and would like to have for a hunting/fighting companion.

In fact, among the regular vampires on the show, you'll find it is even connected to sexuality and love (the question of wether someone dead can feel love is explored quite a lot on Buffy). Darla is the oldest of the regular vamps, and she sired Angel/Angellus/Liam because of his angelic face, and they were lovers. Angel then proceded to sire Drusilla under some wacky evil love obsession, in the process driving her mad. Drusilla later sired Spike, and in the beginning of the show these two are lovers.

The only siring NOT connected to some sort of sympathy is siring done as stunts in the plans to bring Buffy and/or the world down. Allready in the pilot there is the siring of one of the high school kids Buffy associates with, in order to trick her in to a trap, and sometimes vamp victims arise with messages from some vamp to buffy, usually to be immediately staked.

This said, there must be some siring going on all the time, given that the vamps consistently seem to plan "taking over the world and freeing it from the human plague" (not considering what they will eat after, seing they do NOT enjoy their menu of rats blood, which they resort to in down periods, and the bags of pigs blood, eaten by ensouled vampires, just don't feel like the real thing). But there's certainly no monthly doubling of the population.

Wow, this got elaborate.

The article also fails to take into account of deaths outside vampire slayers. An accidental stumbling upon sunlight would surely be a common cause of morbidity among new vampires.

Hmm all these clever-clogs have missed the point. Why not just count the vampires?

OK so there are lots of TV shows etc to look through, but these researchers are clearly not interested in getting a proper job so why not?

And they could extrapolate numbers for the whole world based on the observed population density of vampires.

Yeah, look . . . this is all real fun, etc. But it is also very, very old news. I am in my late 30's and I recall -- as a child -- having one of those books that taught you math and basic science is a fun-for-children way. I distinctly remember learning about exponential growth reading about how vampires couldn't exist because if they just each turned one human into a vampire every month they would soon take over the world. The lesson was illustrated with increasing numbers of cartoonish vampires (green skin, purple capes).
Again . . . I don't mean to knock a fun discussion, but really -- a science paper was written on something I found in a child's introduction to science book thirty years ago?

I think you might be interested in reading Vampire Population Ecology in the Jossverse, by Brian Thomas - http://members.iinet.net.au/~ccroft/Tips/Vampire%20Ecology%20in%20the%20Jossverse.pdf

Personally, I disagree with Brian's assumption that a vampire sires approximately every other year. I'd go with less often, and that would allow for a larger stable vampire population.

Exactly, not only does that not describe how vampires work in Buffy, it doesn't describe how vampires work in MOST fiction. The godfather of vampire fiction is Dracula, and it doesn't work that way there either. Off the top of my head I Am Legend is the only place where it works like that. And that's considered the predecessor to the zombie genre.

Where the logic breaks down with this argument is that Predators don't behave the way the article discusses and Vampires are definitely Predators. Most Predator species will be outnumbered by prey by at least several hundred to one. If the Predator population increases nature and even the Predators themselves take action to decrease the number of Predators. In the wild Predators will turn on each other and kill other Predators if the feeding grounds become too crowded. Prides of Lions going to war with neighbouring Prides, etc. So if the number of Vampires become too many and the feeding stock to few the Vampires themselves may very well turn on each other to claim hunting grounds as their own.

I agree with Perp. If the number of prey starts to crash, then wouldn't the predator numbers follow suit?

Even non-Whedon vampire mythology requires more than a wham-bam-thank you-ma'am kill for vampire reproduction. It's a process. Witness Bram Stroker's original "Dracula," in which Jonathan Harker and the late Lucy's cadre of suitors burst into Mena's room to find Mena drinking the count's blood. (It's wonderfully written, with the obvious metaphor of Mena being caught en flagrante in bed with a man Not Her Husband. There's the requisite shame, cries of "unclean!" and attempts to assuage her guilt by assuring her it wasn't her fault.)

Anyway, Dracula was interrupted in the act, so Mena's transformation into a vampire takes longer than perhaps it might have. And the rest of the story is a rush to kill Dracula before her transformation is complete, since Van Helsing assures everyone that is the only cure. Killing Dracula after Mena is a full-blown vampire won't get you a two-fer. They'd be forced to stake her, cut off her head and fill the mouth with garlic, and nobody wants to do that.

It is truly a Race for the Cure.

So "The Lost Boys" got it a bit wrong there. Killing the head vampire won't do squat to other vampires. Unless you want to believe the Frog Brothers over Van Helsing, which I'm sure no one does. I mean ... we're talking Professor Van Helsing, man.

Good points Perp.

I think a better way to look at how often siring happens is to observe the different personalities. There really isn't any rules to it. Some vampires sire recklessly (think about the vampire who wanted to sire Darla just to get laid), while others only do it for special purposes. It just depends on the vampire. So, if you wanted a real project, you'd have to do a character study and come up with a range of frequencies and the standard deviation.

Dang, I am going to go all geek-Buffy here, but Darla was sired by The Master. On her deathbed. As she was dying of some STD, probably syphylis.

Everyone comments on Vampires as if they in general are supposed to be exactly as Buffy portrays them,but on the subject of this topic they`re are many theories.It dosn`t neccesarily have to Buffys.What if they are smarter than we are and just take what they need for now to keep a low profile?What if they believe there are enough of them and just feed if the theory of drinking blood is the truth?

I always thought I AM LEGEND is more Zombie than Vampire as well..

The vampire mythos, at least in most forms, involves the creation of new vampires being very rare. If a rogue goes astray and starts "breeding" willy-nilly, generally it doesn't take a slayer (of whatever form) to take care of it, as every time I've seen it in fiction, it's looked upon VERY poorly by the vamp powers that be.

Hola fellow nerds,

I wanted to go all BuffyGeek, too, and comment that though the Master did indeed sire Darla originally, when Wolfram and Hart brought her back on Angel it was as a human. She then went on to try to get resired by some dork mullet-sporting hessian-tard vamp. He, indeed, seemed to fancy her in a fittingly unclean way. ----Man, was that a guilty pleasure getting that out.

O.K. the Buffy logic just dosn`t work for me if anyone has read The Anita Blake Novels by Laurell K. Hamilton I would love to talk about it.Buffy isn`t my ideal of reality.

I don't know so much about Buffy. But in the RPG's the legend of vampirism is quite different. The vampires need to feed themselves every day, but they don't necessarily transform others in vampires.

Besides that, the original legend of the vampire was that "One" vampire existed and that's all.

But, let's keep some fantasy for the sake of science (?!?). If we putted this new perspective of vampires feeding everyday, without transform humans in vampires, they could exist ;) don't they?

assuming that vampires "pass" the vampirism to people by feeding, we're treating as a virus, wich could have been cured or simply gone, but not necessarily don't existed.

right?