Various media answer, or attempt to answer, some of these questions.
In the Kitty books, for example, it's established that lycanthropes can't maintain a pregnancy. They can get pregnant, but the zygote is lost as soon as the mother shapeshifts.
In _Being Human_, there's quite a bit of discussion in one episode about werewolf eating habits: namely, that the amount of meat the wolf eats wreaks havoc with the human digestion system for the first several months. Their solution appears to be that the werewolf's body eventually adapts, so even when in human form, the were isn't quite human.
"Nightworld," a series of YA novels by LJ Smith, states that vampires aren't after the blood for food; they're after it for air. Apparently their bodies can't make hemoglobin. So their systems have adapted to strip out the hemoglobin from the intook blood. Presumably the rest is treated as waste, which should mean that the vampires just have to pee a lot.
I can't remember if the Harrison books deal with any of these questions, mostly because I gave up on them very quickly as bad writing in general.
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Date: 2009-07-10 05:17 am (UTC)In the Kitty books, for example, it's established that lycanthropes can't maintain a pregnancy. They can get pregnant, but the zygote is lost as soon as the mother shapeshifts.
In _Being Human_, there's quite a bit of discussion in one episode about werewolf eating habits: namely, that the amount of meat the wolf eats wreaks havoc with the human digestion system for the first several months. Their solution appears to be that the werewolf's body eventually adapts, so even when in human form, the were isn't quite human.
"Nightworld," a series of YA novels by LJ Smith, states that vampires aren't after the blood for food; they're after it for air. Apparently their bodies can't make hemoglobin. So their systems have adapted to strip out the hemoglobin from the intook blood. Presumably the rest is treated as waste, which should mean that the vampires just have to pee a lot.
I can't remember if the Harrison books deal with any of these questions, mostly because I gave up on them very quickly as bad writing in general.