In mass culture, it is often portrayed that a vampire's bite inevitably transforms a person into a vampire, although descriptions of more complex rituals also exist. However, in European folklore, vampires are most often depicted as restless dead, such as sorcerers.
To determine which methods of becoming a vampire are real, scientists turned to zoology. Zoologists were able to reconstruct the evolutionary path of many groups of animals that began to feed on blood. It is noteworthy that various species, including mosquitoes, bats, spiders, snails, and butterflies, independently switched to consuming vertebrate blood more than thirty times during evolution.
Each group of these species began its journey toward hematophagy under different initial conditions and adapted to the new way of life in its own way. Based on the research conducted, the authors suggest that readers imagine themselves as an animal striving to evolve into a blood-sucker and detail the changes required for this.
