Announcing the top article discovered this week, we present to you the best plot SyFy will receive this year for a B-rated horror movie ever! Apparently there is an abandoned Russian Cruise Ship filled with cannibal rats floating somewhere off the coast of Ireland. The rodents are obviously disease-ridden, starving and we have to assume ready to take on any source of protein once they are unleashed on dry land.

Image courtesy of independent.co.uk

Image courtesy of independent.co.uk

Only the strongest of the pack would have survived considering they must have eaten each other to make it this far. The vessel was reportedly missing for nearly a year, and it has already travelled two-thirds of the way to the British Isles. The Independent.co.uk reports that the ship must still be out there somewhere because not all of its lifeboat emergency beacons have been set off:

Two signals were picked up on the 12 and 23 March last year, presumably from lifeboats which fell away and hit the water, showing the vessel had made it two-thirds of the way across the Atlantic and was heading east.

A week later, an unidentified object of about the right size was spotted on radar just off the coast of Scotland – but search planes never verified the find.

Pim de Rhoodes, a Belgian salvage hunter who is among a number looking for the Lyubov Orlova off the UK coastline, told The Sun: “She is floating around out there somewhere.

“There will be a lot of rats and they eat each other. If I get aboard I’ll have to lace everywhere with poison.”

The head of the Irish coastguard, Chris Reynolds, said the ship was more likely than not to still pose a threat.

“There have been huge storms in recent months but it takes a lot to sink a vessel as big as that,” he said. “We must stay vigilant.”

The vessel is named after the popular film actress in Stalin’s USSR, the Lyubov Orlova was built by the Soviets in 1976, and seized in 2010, by Canadian police acting as debt collectors against the ship’s now-private owners. The authorities in Newfoundland tried to sell the hull for scrap – valued at £600,000 – to the Dominican Republic, but cut their losses when it came loose in a storm on the way. Sending the ship off into international waters when found again two months ago, Transport Canada said it was satisfied the Lyubov Orlova “no longer poses a threat to the safety of [Canadian] offshore oil installations, their personnel or the marine environment”. I wonder what they will find on this “Ghost Ship”? They have already established that we can expect cannibal rats, but would there be a few left the size of Rottweilers, or would they find a swarm of rats waiting on a huge mountain of rat feces?

If you are an aspiring writer, don’t let this opportunity pass you by. We would love to see how this story ends because we are not sure if the Lyubov Orlova cruise liner will be found!