What is a vampire's body temperature?

Cafe Society
21

Well, there is some evidence in the text itself. (And by text, I mean the TV show Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, as that is what prompted the original OP.)

As to body temperature, in “The Initiative,” some members thereof are heat-scanning Buffy’s dorm room looking for vamps. Willow and the newly-chipped Spike sitting on her bed talking about his inability to bite her, and the Initiative scans read him at room temperature while all the humans are at 98.6.

In a later episode in the same season, Giles is taunting a chipped Spike about his impotence. It is noted that when a vampire doesn’t drink, he doesn’t die, but rather gets emaciated.

–Cliffy

22

If one could find out the body temperature of an active reptile the same weight as a human/vampire, you could probably figure out how much above ambient breating and muscular action raised a vampires body temperature - but that’s assuming that vampires have a relatively normal biology, and their muscles are powered by nutrients carried to them in red blood cells being broken down chemically.

23

My guess is that since vampires are supernaturally animated, figuring out a working biology based on nature might not work. Unless the vampire has been moving around to build up heat from friction, there wouldn’t be any reason for it to have a temp higher than room temperature.

If the vampire has fed recently, we could assume that the heat from the blood could work its way through and warm up its body. As a reversal of the “skinny vampire” question: does a gluttonous vamp get fat, or just have to use the restroom a lot?

24

Angel shakes hands with a guy early in the series and they comment that his hand is, “cold”.

What Spike exactly says in the Thanksgiving episode is that if Vampires don’t eat blood, they wither into walking skeletons.

25

Angel also shook hands with the Ob/Gyn attending Darla and the Dr. said something like “And people complain my hands are cold”.
I think a recently fed vampire would be warmer, but as Angel keeps his blood in the fridge, that guess may not apply to him.

26

According to the Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency

vampires are cold blooded, making them easy to distinguish from humans with and IR camera.

27

Adrenaline? Do vampires have a functioning endocrine system? That’s an issue I’ve never seen specifically addressed in any vampire literature I’ve read. Do the V:tM books actually mention hormones?

Oh, several people have mentioned sweat, so I just thought I’d throw out the fact that Anne Rice’s vampires do sweat – blood. Maybe not pure blood (I haven’t read any of her books since middle school so I can’t remember precisely), but it’s at least blood-tinged.

28

Cue the vampire geeks!
d&r :smiley:

29

Not that I recall, actually. I suspect it’s merely that Frenzy would be akin to something like a crazy human full of adrenaline and rage. I should have put on a modifyer on that because I wouldn’t think vampires actually have adrenaline, except from the blood that they’ve taken.

With V:tM the blood powers you. Most of the abilities you expend blood points to use, when in frenzy you go through these faster (I think, my c’s have never been in frenzy) because you are just running on animal energy in an attempt to get fed. Either the vampire in frenzy gets taken down by some outside source or they flip out until they get enough blood or they finally drop from lack of blood and end up in torpor.

30

There is nowhere near enough friction in a moving human body to generate an appreciable amount of heat. A vampire might become bloated with blood the way a human can be bloated with water but they would not store the excess as fat since fat is a product of living metabolism. The “shriveling” effect of vampire starvation could be more a product of dehydration since a body is mostly water and vampires get their water from blood which itself is only about 50% water. One might then suppose that a vampires body has significantly less fluid in it than a living body, perhaps less than half. We then have to adjust our temperature change estimates accordingly.

31

I don’t know much about vampires from books/movies/TV, but I did some research on vampire folklore from Eastern and Southern Europe, and legends are all over the place. In Greece, vampires are said to be abnormally hot due to all the blood in them. They are said to be bloated and their skin often reddish and swollen-looking. By contrast, in Hungary vampires are said to be very pale and gaunt, with very dry, stretched-looking skin like that on a mummified corpse. They are supposed to be cold to the touch. In Russia, vampires follow the Greek model, while Romanian vampires look like regular people. (I assume this means they’re also human temperature as well.) Folkloric vampires have many characteristics in common with other supernatural beasties like ghosts, zombies, and werewolves. Many folkloric vampires don’t even suck blood- instead they bring plague and other infectious disease, or behave like the “Old Hag” of hypnogogic fame, sitting on victims’ chests and suffocating them. Some also steal “life force”. Chinese vampires have long fingernails and hop due to rigor mortis. Folklore is a basically useless source, then- information varies greatly and is often contradictory.

Commercial fiction seems to have the most cohesive vampire information, which I suppose began with Dracula. The Count is pale and cold to the touch. Anne Rice apparently followed this model as well. (I’ve never seen “Buffy” or played a vampire RPG.) But being poikilothermic doesn’t make much sense for vamps, since they seem to be physically tireless. Cold-blooded vertebrates tire quickly and easily, and must frequently rest between bursts of exertion. Someone mentioned a cold-blooded animal the approximate size and weight of a human: the Nile monitor lizard is a close fit, attaining lengths of six feet and weighing in at close to 150 lbs. But these are hardly energy-efficient animals, at least not in the typical mammalian sense. They are capable of great bursts of speed and strength, but they are useless in endurance. Their body temperature is the same as the ambient temperature, with a slight increase during digestion and a slightly greater increase during exertion. Sustained temperatures below about 65 degress F will send them quickly into a torpor, and any lower will result in death. Dracula hung out in the snowy Carpathians. Obviously not cold-blooded.

As for starvation, I think dehyrdation probably makes more sense. But following again the reptile model, vampires might well be extremely efficient at conserving fluids. Your average lizard is an amazingly water-tight vessel, can recycle waste water, and many species do not drink at all, obtaining water from food sources instead. But this has consequences. I don’t kow if vampires excrete, but I’m assuming they must if they are actively metabolizing blood. If they’re like lizards, they’d have to excrete in the form of uric acid crystals as opposed to liquid urine. They’d dehydrate too easily otherwise, or need an almost constant source of nourishment, suffering greatly in lean times.

Of course, vampires aren’t real- they’re supernatural creatures, and nothing about them is going to fit with what we know of biology or physiology. This is a great boon for writers, but frustrating for us scientific types who feel compelled to explain even the impossible. But it’s a fun mental exercise all the same. :slight_smile:

32

The easiest way to confront the issue is from a real-world perspective, without use of magic. Yet.

  1. Vampires are undead. We may therefore presume that means they have no metabolism, therefore they do not generate heat internally via metabolism.

  2. We may, then, assume their body temperature is roughly equivalent to the ambient temperature… except for any heat generated by the internal friction of movement, use of muscles, etc. This is actually pretty minimal, although it is measurable, and will rise as the vampire’s activity level rises. Imagine an alligator at rest vs. an alligator in the process of trying to drag down a large prey, and you’ll get a general idea of “activity.”

Therefore, vampires have a variable body temperature that generally stays around the same as the ambient or “room” temperature. We may therefore assume that sleeping with one would be kind of creepy and uncomfortable.

An alternative to this takes advantage of the literary fact that a vampire looks healthier shortly after he/she/it has fed. We may, then, assume that a vampire suddenly achieves a warm flush after feeding, and therefore has internal body temperature more or less equivalent to that of a human being. Precisely how this would work is unclear, though, scientifically; we’d just have to chalk it up to “the same supernatural forces that made a corpse able to get up and smell roses and play baccarat.”

This would make sex with one considerably more appealing, if one can forget the fact that one’s lover has just gone out and torn someone’s throat out in order to achieve this state of ersatz sexiness…

33

I’ve always shuddered at the thought of kissing a vampire because I figured he’d be cold and dead.

And speaking of which, with no circulation, how do male vampires get … uh, “pumped up”… to do the dirty deed???

The things you wonder about when you can’t sleep at night…

34

According to VtM, it’s simple: Just spend a blood point!

Of course, bloody spooj is another big turn off, I would think.

Also, according to Buffy, a vampire’s heart does not beat, therefore, there’s no flow of blood, thus, no nutrients being broken down and distributed to muscle/body tissue, and hence, no metabolism. Blood offers life due to it’s mystical nature. Okay, I’m pulling another source, and it’s a kinda stupid one, but there was a live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon a while back, and in it Donatello developed a “Sun Light.” It didn’t work. Why? Because it’s the mystical properties of the sun that harm the vampires, not the scientific aspects (i.e. UV light). They’re a mystical creature, they don’t need the blood for nutrients, they need the blood because of the life essence. There’s no nutrients in essence, yet it’s mystical properties are what keep the vampires alive. Science doesn’t factor into how vampires function or move about in the Buffy Verse. It just so happens, that science can be used to help combat and recognize them in certain instances.

35

Well, depending on the author, “doing the deed” is a pale (pun intended) shadow of what the vampire experiences drinking blood.

Not to mention that sexual arousal is a thing that living creatures experience owning to those bizarre hormonal chemicals that course through their bodies.

Dead people don’t need nookie . . .

36

ahhh… ermmm…

Sorry - I think my freudian slip is showing. . . perhaps "Doing the Deed was intended in a way other than the way my perverted mind percieved. . .

:smiley:
Shame though - given the lovely double-entendres rampant in vampire lore: “tapping some fine little thing” means something different in vampire-land than in the standard vernacular.

37

Given that they eat, I think that the simplest assumption is that vampires do, in fact, metabolize. I’ll assume, for simplicity, that a vampire derives the same number of Calories from drinking blood as a human would. Then, all we need to know is the number of liters per day that the typical vampire drinks, and the caloric content of blood. Essentially all of the energy used by a metabolizing being ends up as heat, so then all we have to do is determine at what temperature a vampire would have to be to release that heat rate to the environment.

38

Do they ever talk about the internal organs of a vampire in the show? In a few lores and the like, the only organ still left intact in a vampire’s body is the heart. The stomach, intestines, kidneys, and all those other wonderful organs rot and deteriorate. Makes digestion kinda impossible, no? For the most part, many believe vampires act as simple vessels of blood. They don’t actually digest it, their body simply holds it, and eventually, it evaporates or is expelled, the essence is drained, and more is needed.

Now, we’ve all seen Spike drink beer and eat, but we’ve never seen him take a crap (or have we? I haven’t seen much of the past two seasons), which makes me think that in the Buffyverse, a vampire’s digestive system is hardly functioning.

And also, Angel was locked in a stone casket for a month or so without any blood. If they actually digested it for nutrient purposes, he’d have nothing left, so how could his body move without any calories to run on? Again, I’m thinking it’s more the mystical “source of life” than anything diet related.

39

Actually moving away from the Buffy, Angel and V:tM takes on vampires for a bit…

There have been several thread references to a “supernatural” essence being a reason for the vampire, but I’ve read several takes where authors have posited that that’s not the case. If, for example, the vampirism was caused by a sort of virus, or if in fact it was a true mutation of humanity caused by exposure to some outside agent, then we might see some different reactions entirely.

I don’t ever call having read anything to indicate that extreme cold temperatures would drive a vampire into torpor. Therefore, would it be safe to assume that a vampire’s hypothalamus is working, to some extent, to regulate the body temperature? If so, we can probably assume that some level of heat is being given off, no matter what. Since it doesn’t seem that they can starve to death either, my vote’s that said heat has to do with how much blood they last took in, how long it’s been since they’ve fed, and what kind of metabolic rate the vampire has – there’s got to be some differentiation in that, since some vamps seem to be able to go ages without feeding and some seem to need a great deal more.

What determines said metabolic rate, I couldn’t begin to guess, but I imagine it would differ depending upon whether you believe that there are supernatural forces powering the whole deal or if the vampirism is due to mutation and/or viral work. If it’s the former, anything goes. If the latter, you could probably figure something out by looking at the workings of the viral agent or mutagen.

One thought, if you’re into the mutagen/viral theory: perhaps the mutagen/virus/whatever is able to survive on its own resources almost indefinitely or is able to drive itself and its host into an indeterminate period of dormancy if needed. The blood, in that case, would act as a catalyst to enable it to do more than simply survive. But that’s just a guess.

By the way, IMHO, ‘doing the nasty’ and the ability thereto is probably the second point of most variance I’ve seen in vampire fiction, with the third being levels of supernatural/superhuman ability and the first being the cause of the vampirism. To throw in two more authors I haven’t yet seen mentioned, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s male vampires can’t [and IIRC, she does an excellent job of explaining just why; I’m too senile to remember what the explanation was]; Tanya Huff’s can, but she posits that vampires have a metabolism; it’s just a LOT slower than the average human’s. [Hers age as well.] And of course, there are the dozens and dozens of writers who take positions somewhere in between.

It’s all the fault of the writers. Bunch of damn inconsistent…

[sub] Hm, just seemed to have drenched myself with tar from that brush I was wielding…[/sub]

40

Once again I must say how disappointed I am that the Initiative was screwed up by Dr. Walsh. It was the perfect facility to test, measure, experiment, and develop a scientifically grounded theory that explained these things.

But given the paucity of information at our disposal, I am afraid we must conclude for the moment that … a wizard did it.

  • Rick **
    [/QUOTE]

In fact, I though of this before, and get to develop a theyr explainig sometings in vampires´ metabolism. Altrough I´m not a byologist, I spoke about this matter with a friend of mine who is a byologist and told me my theory was quite interesting and almost real (in better words, it had a little chance to be plausible). Odds are, I´m spanish so I don´t think my english is good enough to expose here what my thoery is and make it understanable (by the way, I apologize for my lame english). And my thoery didn´t explain ita all, just some things (like a vampire getting harmed by sunlight, woodstakes and garlic, how they get a kind of blood circulation without their hearts pondiing and their exceptonal strengh and agility). Of coures, I had to neglet some powers (how can explain a vampire turning into a bat or the like?)traditionaly own by the vampires. Anyway, I think that anybody could develop a theory similar to mine thinking just a little.
Oh, and one last thing, I´m no gothci or a vampirre freak, I just like this stuff, that´s all.