“You catch more flies with honey than
you do with vinegar.” –Liz Lemon
“Why would want to catch flies?” –Jack
Donaghy
As we are now getting into the thaw of
spring, I think it is safe to say that winter is behind us but as far as
winters go, this one has been pretty mild as far as precipitation. The
temperatures were brutal but there was less than normal as far as ice and
snow. Whenever you talk to farmers or kids in the
know, a mild winter is bad for a couple of reasons but one of the things that
you don’t consider is the bug population. We always make the comment of wanting
a hard freeze to kill off all the ticks and bugs. Generally, after a mild
winter, the bug population is pretty intense the winter afterward.
But this leads me to postulate a
theory. Take your common housefly. They come along and land of a dead body.
They vomit or lay their eggs or whatever. The egg matures into a maggot and
then the maggot eats dead flesh from the host that it was laid on. We have to
assume that any flesh tainted with the Kharon virus would make the meat toxic.
I have to assume that even if a cow does not animate from the virus, it would
still be considered “infected” and anyone eating that meat afterward would have
to result in death.
So if maggots eat infected flesh, do
they die and not transform into flies? Is it possible that maggots are such
simple creatures that the virus does not affect them?
I remember when the AIDS outbreak was
still being studied, there was an initial fear that mosquitos would be able to
spread the disease if they drank the blood of an infected person and then bit
an uninfected person. Thankfully, that theory was debunked pretty quickly but
if that was the case, that disease could have spread faster than Kharon did.
We have already established that zoms
will eat anything they perceive as meat that they come across. Does limit the
availability of corpses for flies to lay eggs on? Will we see a dramatic
decrease in the fly population this year because of the zombies? I guess that
is one thing we can chalk up in the win column.
Still, I wonder about things that are
noted scavengers: vultures, buzzards, hyenas, and (according to some
researchers) Tyrannosaurus Rexes. We have seen obvious cases where animals will
outright avoid these shambling corpses. But what about the ones that we have
brained? Will a vulture have natural instinct or sense enough to disregard a
tainted corpse or will they just be like, “Free meal!” Can they detect if a
corpse is lethal to consume? And we have seen the smallest bite turn into a
full blown infection. I have to assume even tasting a small portion of tainted
meat would be fatal. We are not concerned about zombie vultures but that piece
of the ecological puzzle could get pulled out of the equation.
And what effect would that have on the
planet? Oh well, questions for men a heck of a lot smarter than me…
