biologyweeps:

That depends of course on what sort of vampire we’re aiming for. Infectious vampirism would require an infectious agents of course and there I would tend more towards viruses because they do muck around with DNA and protein construction so for physical changes that’d be neat.

At the same time, parasitic infectious a la The Strain are also really tempting, especially because it drifts over into ‘behavioural changes caused by parasites’ which is just hella cool, though I figure that those vampires would be sitting halfway between what we tend to think of as vampires and Umbrella Corp zombies. 

If we’re going with non-infectious vampirism, the field of genetics is wiiiiide open, though personally I’m not a huge fan of the whole ‘super predator’ thing because again, evolution the straight C student. You wouldn’t get twilight-style ‘super attractive/fast/strong’ because frankly one of those would be perfectly sufficient and as we all know, the concept of evolution is to get a ‘good enough’ and that’s it. Look at cheetahs. They’re incredibly speedy, but like sighthounds they’re not terribly strong. They don’t need to be. If you can run your intended prey down and strangle-bite the exhausted gazelle, there’s no need for you to be able to rip it into two parts as well. 

So like, you’re vampires are fabulously hot, chances are it’s a prey lure tactic and they’re not very fast. If you make them poisonous they might not even be very strong. On the other hands, if they’re ugly as sin you’re most likely looking at something that’s doesn’t need to make humans come close it so it probably *is* really speedy and/or strong enough to kill you before you can get away.

So uh yeah basically first you gotta settle on what sort of vampirism you want and then you gotta consider how you’d arrive at that particular kind through evolutionary sensible means (meaning with the last amount of effort). Thankfully nature provides for a lot of inspiration already if you want to wrangle out specific details.