How did the animals survive, did they go into the vaults or what?

Meh some are bound to of survived by just pure luck, not everyone was in a vault

Most were mutated and turned into something else........like people and ghouls.........but one of those little facts that come up in the loading screens state that dogs were largely unaltered by the radiation.

Some Rats, Roaches and Scorpions survived because they could hide in crevices and holes that were not irradiated as much. But I assume over time the radiation that they were exposed to created Mole Rats, Rad roaches and Radscorpions. Its kinda odd because the smaller the organism the more fatal even the smallest amount of radiation would be (that's the reason you don't get germs, viruses and bacteria in the irradiated water therefore the only sickness in the wasteland is radiation sickness). So the survivor rats and roaches must have been hiding in various well hidden caves.

Yao Guai (bears), Ghouls (humans) and Deathclaws (???) could have survived because they are larger organisms and radiation was less fatal (still bad though) then if they were smaller. But like the smaller critters they still got mutated.

ok that makes sense

Deathclaws were mutated Jackson's Cameoleon's, and Mole Rats are not true rats like the Norway Rats living around the world today, though they are rodents. I actually remember reading a terminal entry that implied that the mutated Mole Rat's were an experimental measure to fight the Chinese, but at that time they were sterile.

The whole concept of it being over 200 years after the war and there still being so much radiation is nonsense, isn't it?
There would be minute amounts of radiation in the soil and water. Animals would not mutate, they would die. Humans would not mutate, they would die of cancer. The end.

jk edit!

You see, I think the whole concept of thermonuclear war is ridiculous. In 2077 all the nations will have is neutron bombs, not thermonuclear devices. They would have come to their senses by then and used a more green, earth friendly method of global destruction.

Scorpions have been around since the dawn basically. They are extremely hardy so it's no wonder they survived.

I wonder if any cats survived. Dogs can be your best companion in the wasteland, but cats are questioned. An NPC in Fallout 2 mentions how her family had to eat their cat because of a food shortage.

Oh i didnt know that, i was just making an assumption on the Mole Rats cause for all i know they could be mutated http://static.open.salon.com/files/naked-mole-rat1229447302.jpg.



Small amounts of radiation cant kill you and after thousands of years there still would be traces of radiation in the soil. So its hard to remove that sort of thing.

I agree with the neutron bomb idea though.

Remember we're dealing with SCIENCE!, not science.


They probably are, just mutated to grow bigger with FEV.

Yeah, which didn't make sense to me since there are still mole rats around so they're obviously not sterile. So yeah, I can't swallow that mole rats are FEV mutations.

It is possible that some were botched and ended up fertile, explaining the mole rats being away from East Africa.

Yeah, its in the wiki!



Nuetron Bombs focus on high amounts of radiation instead of a large explosion. I mean, its still a large explosion, but they are made to destroy entire armies and make their equipment useless. Hydrogen bombs are what we use nowadays, but im not sure if nuclear technology took the same route as ours did. Moderator: Political comment deleted.

Not everything was nuked. There aren't nearly enough nuclear weapons in existence to cover every square mile of the Earth's surface. Even the nuclear holocaust of the Fallout universe would have been less destructive than the mass-extinction events that have actually happened in the Earth's history, and animals still survived those. The animals that are best adapted to extreme changes in the environment or live outside of the rage of the effects of the disaster tend to survive (small mammals, insects, anything that lives under water, etc.) while the ones that are specialized for specific conditions tend to die (giant dinosaurs meant to live in a warm world.)



Neutron bombs are basically super dirty bombs, they're meant to produce a small explosion (limited damage to structures and such) and extreme radiation (to kill living things.) You've got it totally backwards. The neutrons ARE the radiation.

And scorpions haven't been around since the origin of life, multicelled organisms appeared roughly a billion years after the first life is thought to have evolved. There were giant 8 foot sea-scorpions in the precambrian, though. But that was hundreds of millions of years ago, not billions.

Yes, how come the radiation is affecting lives since hundreds of yrs.... It's utter bluff...

If nuclear weapons followed the same path as the ones in real life, then yu wouldnt need to cover every square mile. There was a survey or something (or some quote) that stated that the Russians (real life, this has relevance) had enough nuclear weapons to kill every living thing on this planet, so why not the US or China in the Fallout Universe?




The radiation from the Nuetron bombs is too intense for it too just "disappear" after a while. In areas where the bombs actually exploded, the radiation would still be intense and lingering.

We did a project in History that if a ICBM hit one of the targets around our town (Primary, secondary, tertiary) that anything basically within a 5 mile radius would be gone.

Presumably cats were forced into extinction (or severly endangered) as everybody(and everything) found cats easy prey for dinner.

I presume most animals survived due to hiding in Metro Tunnels, Caves, and the like. Perhaps a Vault or two contained some animals (one contained a panther).

I read on the Fallout Wiki that there was a "black rain" that rained like ash and irradiated death onto the Earth, putting species of animals and plants into extinction. That would explain why there is no vegetation in the Wasteland. The "black rain" might have altered the soil and made it unable to grow more plants and such. And cats were probably dumb enough to run into the black rain and get themselves killed.

well according to the background story humans ate all the cats but not the numerous dogs roaming all over the world in large meat-filled packs.

seems that there where alot of cat-haters doing the Fallout world background story documents, since not even cougars where left alive or even mutated. *shakes head*

Actually if a nuclear war broke off in the beginning of the 80s, when the stockpile was at it's highest, and every nuke reached it's target, it would barely kill everyone in the major centers, let alone everything live in the planet. MAD was actually just intended to make the sure losses unacceptable, it didn't really assumed it was possible to completely destroy the world, or even the US/USSR. The nuclear holocaust was really just a myth, a pacifist FUD to prevent a nuclear war (which would me nonetheless disastrous). In reality nuclear weapons are much less powerful than people imagine, and about 80-90% of the expected casualties in a nuclear war would be caused by the famines, diseases, lack of medical services, riots, and etc which would follow the mass panic and governmental disruption, and not by it's direct effects. So no, humans couldn't cause a mass extinction in the planet even if they deliberately tried to.


It's exactly because it's so intense that it's short lived, plus N-bombs produce very little fallout. In neutron bombs there's a short burst of intense ionizing radiation (1 day - 1 week at most), and then residual radiation would fall beneath 10%. After 3 weeks you could spend up to 4 hours unprotected on the ground zero before it becomes dangerous, and 4 more months the area would be fully habitable again.

Actually- if a nuclear war had broken out in the 1980's, there would be far more disasterous effects from it. Not from the Radiation or damage to structures, oh, no, no, no.

Nope. Death would come in the form of... a giant sun-blocking cloud of dust. A large enough explosion can do this (the volcanic explosion of Krakatoa is belived to be the direct cause for the lack of a warm summer the following year, causing all kinds of nasty stuff, such as famine.) I'm pretty sure that with the nuclear stockpile amount in 1980, there'd be more than enough nukes to kick up enough dust to cause a global climate shift for at least a few years. Of course, this is assuming that most of that arsenal was not in the form of Neutron Bombs.

At any rate, as I said before on another thread, animal life on earth has survived worse than a nuclear holocaust (including a Snowball Earth Event; where the earth's warmest part is similar to a siberian summer) as well as a comet hit (which mimicked the effects of a Nuclear Holocaust... minus the radiation.) Humans can't really render earth unhospitable to animal life with our present tech level- we'd need to send something the size of Pluto smacking into Earth to do that.

Also- microbes are far more hardy than anybody (apparently) thinks. When we landed on the Moon, one of the missions involved finding a robotic lander from a previous mission. NASA was surprized to find streptococus bacteria on one of the peices brought back; they surmized that they had improperly cleaned the peice before launching it into space; and the bacteria went into some kind of hibernation in a near-total vacuum for at least 6 years. (I say near-total as space isn't a perfect vacuum- there's still a pound of dust per million square miles or something up there)

The nuclear winter theory has long been discredited. Even Sagan himself already admitted that. When calculating the particle upthrust he made a number of senseless assumptions, such as taking a suburban fire as a model for big cities. Since most of buildings in big cities are made of concrete instead of wood, the amount of dust thrown up the atmosphere would actually be tens of times less than what he calculated. Plus, since the dust would be spread out a large area instead of coming from a single source (like in the case of mega volcanoes), the effects would be much more transitory and weaker as well.

Well, that's news to me.

I'll make a note of it...

*does some searching* You may want to look at this.



This was pulled from Wikipedia. Furthermore, these were the citations used for that quote.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/12/061211090729.htm
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/nuclear/

Unless Sagan discredited it 2007 (about 11 years after he died) then Nuclear Winter- or at least a Nuclear Global Cooling- is still valid.

Heres an interesting website on the effects of the nuclear explosions on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq5.html


Heres a quote from the website that helps disprove what you stated.