ghost ship 2: it's a rat-eat-rat world.

[rmd]

Sometimes, there are ghost ships on the oceans - vessels that have been ripped away from their moorings by a tsunami, or just found abandoned drifting (or in the case of the Mary Celeste, abandoned but still under sail).

But right now, there is a ship - the Lyubov Orlova, which used to be a cruise ship - drifting across the Atlantic. Not all of its lifeboat EPIRBs have triggered, so some of the lifeboats (and presumably the rest of the main vessel) are above the waterline. It appears to be drifting towards the UK, and it is likely full of cannibalistic rats.

Comments

[rmd.livejournal.com]

I don't actually know how rats handle becoming non-cannibalistic. The most recent Bond film touched on this topic, but one should never believe a Bond villain: "You just leave it. And they begin to get hungry, then one by one, they start eating each other, until there are only two left. The two survivors. And then what - do you kill them? No. You take them, and release them into the trees. Only now, they don't eat coconut anymore. Now they will only eat rat."

In the rat-infested cinema of my imagination, they've somehow managed to find a giant supply of grain and so the ship is positively *teeming* with rats. About like things starting at 1:04 in this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=IOwinLWrEIw#t=63?).

[wrog]

um. Last I checked, rats aren't vegetarian, so even in their initial state they wouldn't touch coconut.

Also if this were actually true, seems to me you'd want to create bunches of cannibal rats, release them into, say, New York, so that they can go down into the sewers and eat all of the other rats (file under: Reasons I Should Not Be an Urban Planner, Part XVI)

[rmd.livejournal.com]

They're omnivores, so I assume they'd eat coconut. I don't know if they'd go for the whole "put the lime in the coconut" combo, but you never know.