I was just thinking about how the infection would be carried out should it occur, so here's whaat I think the life cycle of a zombie would happen. Stage-1 Subject gets infected through either prior infected source of first infected. virus initailly runs as typical flu-like virus if infection is incured by a bite, the wound would be partailly anesthetize to insure best possibility of continuing infection. at the end of "stage one" the subject may still retain self (personality prior to infection) but may display cannibalistic tendencies or continue to display personallity prior to infection but no longer be susceptible to fatal injury (not including damage to brain area) Stage-2 Loss of subjects personallity incurs resulting in near complete personality blanking. subject may still retain some habitual memory or learned behavior (opening doors, partial speech recocnition to close family). At stage-2, the subject is still relatively "fresh" and is able to run and display quick reflexes near comperable to unifected, and will continue to run towards "fresh food". Note, a permanent basic behavior pattern of prefering "fresh" meat will continue to persist. Stage-3 Stage-3 incurs several hours after large-scale infection when "fresh" food is no longer plentiful. The subject will slow down (possibly stop movement all together) regor mortis will set in stiffining the subject. As the subject attemps to move during regor mortis, varrious tendons and muscle will brake, producing the slow shuffling walk most associated with zombie movement. Also during stage-3, primary senses such as eye sight, smell, and hearing (note, hearing is the last sense to leave). Any eye sight that persists is reduced to blobs of shapes and the subject is most likely to respond to rapid changes in colour. Stage-4 Stage-4 is the final stage prior to complete death of the subject. (length of stage-4 is heavily determined on enviroment the subject is in.) The subjects movements will continue to deteriorate as flesh continues to rot off. Any possible behavior preference the subject may have had prior to stage-4 will be completely deteriorated and subject may begin to consume any nearby "food" wether it's non-infected or a fellow zombie. Subject may also begin to consume self. Note, this can also happen as early as stage-2 when subject consumes soft tissue around the mouth area. this includes lips, cheeks and even tongue. Stage-5 Complete cell death in soft tissue (muscle movement). However the subject may continue to remain highly infective and should be quarantined as surrounding area is contaminated. I think this covers the generally agreed apon version of zombies. I'm not including the ones with supernatural powers just the general viral outbreak scenario.
Pretty good! I assume in Stage-3, you mean tendons and muscles will "break" instead of "brake", accounting for continued loss of coordination once rigor mortis wears off. At what stage do they start shouting "Brains! Brains!"?
yeah, I made a small spelling mistake. Maybe I was thinking about cars at the time. at any rate, I'd think that if the zombie was able to speak any words it wouldn't be able to understand what it's saying. whatever it attributes to the word 'brains' could mean something else entirely. That and if zombies ate brains exclusivly than they'd be killing the only thing that allows them to continue their moter functions thus defeating widespread outbreaks. if that were true, we'd see a lot more movies where the zombies have more head trauma like exposed brains which would be immidiatly eaten by another zombie. and the outbreak would pretty much take care of itself since they'd be wasting time breaking each others heads open since normal people would be harder to catch.
I think it has something to do with the victims being alive and not dead. there has to be something that triggers the hunger in zombies. in some geners they see a human and attack some its sound and smell. but why do zombies have to eat humans in the first place?
Don't worry; I was being facetious, as were the movies with this kind of zombie. For the purpose of consistency, you can ignore them.
well, the general belief is that only the most basic requirements of human needs will continue to exert itself. such examples are: having to eat, the continued existance of the species (procreation), and safety. zombies procreating isn't normally considered scary so they go with the feeding on flesh. as for the canabolism part, humans are a plentiful food source innitially.