They look a bit like hamsters, but they are notoriously fierce. Case in point: a lemming attacking a sled dog. Like many rodents, they are prodigious reproducers, but the Norway lemming and the brown lemming have particularly dramatic population booms. Their population can fluctuate so chaotically that, for centuries, people have been coming up with wild explanations for the overwhelming abundance of little lemmings, followed by a seemingly sudden disappearance.
Locals "came to see the lemming as a crazed creature, and a swarm as 'the forerunner of war and disaster,'" writes Henry Nicholls for BBC. Karl S. Kruszelnicki at ABC Science recounts:. Back in the s, the geographer Zeigler of Strasbourg, tried to explain these variations in populations by saying that lemmings fell out of the sky in stormy weather, and then suffered mass extinctions with the sprouting of the grasses of spring.
By: Jesslyn Shields Jul 20, You've probably heard of a lemming before, but maybe just in context of a metaphor for someone so stupid they would follow a bunch of other people into a bad situation rather than think critically about their position and act according to their best judgment. Lemmings are not impressionable people, however — they are actually a group of several species of small rodents native to the Arctic regions of the globe.
They are stocky, short-tailed voles that burrow under the snow in winter, providing food for Arctic foxes and snowy owls, and spend the summer mating and eating mosses and grasses that aren't available in the winter. They migrate when food becomes scarce and can even swim across rivers and lakes when necessary. They also have the reputation for being extremely aggressive — rather than running away from a predator, they charge their attacker.
They've even been known to attack humans studying lemmings. So, why would these little creatures, interested in preserving life and limb to the point that they would fight a human or a weasel rather than be eaten, also commit suicide? The truth is, their reputation for jumping off sea cliffs en masse is a myth.
It's unclear what causes these migrations, but social stress, food shortage or predators are candidates. Suicide is not a good explanation. The lemming suicide myth was popularized in the Disney film " White Wilderness " in which many lemmings were allegedly herded off a sea cliff so that the filmmakers could get dramatic footage of "lemming suicide. One way lemmings affect the ecosystems in the arctic has to do with a phenomenon called population cycling.
Lemmings are hamster-sized rodents that live in the snowy Arctic. They have a reputation for participating in massive migrations, where herds of the tiny critters mindlessly leap off of cliffs to their deaths. The lemming myth was popularized by none other than the Walt Disney Company in the Academy Award-winning nature documentary, White Wilderness. The filming of these Norwegian lemmings, for example, was done in Alberta, Canada. Rumor has it that the Walt Disney company paid a dollar per lemming to Inuit hunters to provide the rodents.
The film stages these lemmings in their march to death. In the film, they show hundreds of lemmings spilling off a cliff into the ocean to drown.
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