How long do zombies last

Kimberlee Moran: That depends a lot on the environmental conditions where the zombie finds himself. But the first thing that happens is the eyes go dull, and they decompose quite quickly. Moran: After nine months, depending on the environment, there wouldn't be eyes anymore. They're basically big sacs of fluid, so they're the first things to go. And within 24 hours, decomposition begins. It starts with a discoloration in the lower abdomen, and within three days the entire body is showing signs of decay.

The initial stages happen quite quickly. MTV: So most zombies who have these cloudy, creepy eyes, actually shouldn't have eyes at all. Moran: Right. Another thing that's unrealistic about zombies is that our bodies are subject to rigor mortis.

Within three to six hours of death, all the muscles in your body release lactic acid. You go completely rigid, it's like a full-body cramp. It dissipates within a few days, so then your zombie could move around again, but immediately after death you wouldn't be able to move at all.

In short: Milton should have been too immobilized by lactic acid to get up and bite Andrea, but those cloudy eyes are dead on. MTV: Based on the timeline of "The Walking Dead," many of these zombies have been dead for weeks, months, or even more than a year in cases where they've been locked indoors since the world ended.

Where should they be in terms of decomposition after a few weeks? But the zombies seem to avoid the next step of decomposition: bloat. Pretty soon after death, the bacteria that live in the body will start digesting internal tissues and releasing gases that get trapped in the gut, causing the body to inflate, or bloat, Unfred said.

This process happens to all dead creatures. A dead deer, for example, might swell up so much that the legs stick straight out like pins in a pincushion. Sometimes, the bloat is so severe that the body will burst, she added. Being that the zombies aren't real, it's no surprise that the ones in "Fear the Walking Dead" don't adhere to normal biological processes and somehow avoid this step of decay.

Soon after bloating begins, skin will slough off and lose its moisture. Inside the body, tissues will continue to break down and detach from bone. So, zombies' ability to walk around also defies the natural decay process, because a dead body would no longer have tendons holding its bones together. In " World War Z ," for instance, Pitt's character counts out the seconds from bite to zombification, whereas most infections take days, months or even years in the case of HIV to manifest.

That high infectivity makes the zombie epidemic unstoppable in most cases, according to Smith's model. Only frequent, increasingly effective attacks against humanity's transformed brethren would win an actual zombie war, he said. Top 10 Doomsday Fears ]. To model that kind of human-zombie tangling, Smith used a relatively new mathematical technique called "impulsive differential equations," which show how abrupt shocks affect systems.

Commonly used to model satellite orbits, the technique didn't appear until the s, whereas most mathematical tools date back centuries, Smith said.

Zombies IRL Applying such techniques to the flesh-devouring masses provides more than geeky entertainment, Smith said. It also serves an educational purpose, with a number of colleges and even high schools using the paper to introduce mathematical modeling to students, he said. Tara Smith, an infectious disease professor at the University of Iowa, uses the paper to show how math models can predict the effects of quarantines, vaccines and other public health measures.

The zombie model's methods have already proved useful in at least one real-life analysis. Eventually, cartilage will decay and the bones will just fall apart which will make them much less dangerous.

Them bones, them bones gonna walk around! Trying to help you folks here to think outside the coffin. Clearly the virus causing zombyism also leads to metabolic changes such that only unessential bodytissue rots away while there is a slowdown of rotting in the tissue essential for the survival and propagation of the virus.

So whatever you think you know about the behavior of dead human tissue is mute as soon as this tissue is infected with the virus. Anyone up for some zombie sex? Zombies live as long as the plot requires. If the zombies are alive, they could last longer than a couple of months a zombie could live for one to two years. Judging by the success of the first years of the series. Although reanimation occurs whenever the living die, the main siege is over and those remaining are already infected, the siege could go on until humanity develops an immunity, or until the scientists develop a vaccine to prevent it.

Reading through most of these replies got me thinking. If zombies are the dead reanimated but are still decomposing, then how can the brain survive longer than a couple minutes? The brain simply cannot function for more than a few minutes without a constant supply of air. The question here, as I think has already been stated in the article as well as the comments, is if the zombie infection deters the organisms that cause decomposition from eating away at the flesh or if the normal rate of decomposition still applies.

Separate of course from other factors such as temperature, climate, and terrain to name a few. Zombies drool. The sun is relentless. The dry air is relentless. End of game. But zombies also eat humans who are stock full of moisture. There are animals who go their whole lives without one drink of water just by getting water from plants and other organisms that they eat. We have cats and they drink plenty. I love how your name is Selina and you were the one who brought up cats!! I think that if the water the zombies have to begin with, adding of course the water obtained via other humans eaten, found a way to metabolize into fat of some form depending solely on how dead the zombies will be , then it is possible that the conflict can and will be very prolonged.

OMG, and they can also convert this mystery lipid into water to explain all the slobbering which, wait, continues to lose water. OK, that dead ended. In the end zombies or whatever code group is in a similar state would last days, not months, and not years.

I am going to explain this in as simple of a manner as I possibly can to you, since you obviously have no working knowledge of basic human anatomy. It will remain water. Now, my theory is based on the idea that, in all likelihood, zombies are alive and infected with some form of an RNA virus. Therefore, when they feed on other humans, what they digest nourishes their body. This includes ingesting the water from their victim via blood, brain fluid, and other liquids in the human body.

This is much different from a fat body. With their hunting and stalking of prey, some of the fat will eventually be worked off. This gives them reason to continue to hunt and feed. By those means, the zombie apocalypse would last much longer because the zombies would be living creatures whose nourishment is us. Class dismissed. By the end of the first stage of decay in a human corpse — which can be as short as a week — the bacteria in the mouth has traveled to the brain and eaten it out so much that it oozes out of the nose like mush.