Who is a lemming? Detailed answer

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Who is a lemming? Detailed answer

Big encyclopedia for children and adults

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Who is a lemming?

The lemming is a small, mouse-like rodent that lives in cold areas. The animal has only 13 cm in length. He lives in Norway, Sweden and Lapland.

Lemmings feed on roots, stems and moss. A female usually has two broods per year, each with 3 to 5 cubs.

But what attracts people to this creation? It turns out that every 3-4 years armies of these rodents run through certain parts of Norway, Sweden and Lapland. They always move in the direction from the hills to the sea. It can be different directions, but always to the sea.

Lemmings advance slowly but steadily, ignoring obstacles. They usually do this at night and sleep and eat during the day. This army crosses rivers and swims across lakes several kilometers wide. They pass through the whole city, as if they are being pulled by an unknown force that cannot be resisted.

As they advance, they cause enormous damage, destroying all varieties of vegetable crops. They are followed by crowds of animals and birds, whose usual food is just lemmings. They attack these rodents, kill and eat them.

Since this march to the sea is undertaken once every 3-4 years and they multiply rapidly, the army is so large that it is not exterminated by such a large number of enemies. And when the lemmings finally reach the sea, they throw themselves into the waves and end their lives like that. Not a single rodent returns from this trip!

How to explain this mysterious phenomenon? As far as we know, this is due to overpopulation conditions. When lemmings become too numerous to live and feed on everything in their usual habitats, a special instinct drives them to rush to the sea.

Author: Likum A.

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

How did Hewlett and Packard choose the name for their company?

William Hewlett and David Packard, when choosing the name of their company, tossed a coin to determine whose last name would come first. And although Packard won, he still settled on the Hewlett-Packard option.

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Sleep protects against colds 11.09.2015

Sleep is sometimes called the cure for all diseases, and there is a truth to this - lack of sleep weakens our defense systems, so that viruses and bacteria have a good chance to enter the body and gain a foothold in it. However, until now, the beneficial, "health" properties of sleep were based on subjective evidence, when a person himself assessed his condition depending on the "dose of sleep" and reported this to physicians. Such surveys are certainly important, but they are definitely not sufficient for rigorous scientific conclusions.

Aric Prather of the University of California at San Francisco, along with colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, managed to obtain more objective evidence that sleep helps to resist, if not all diseases, then at least the common cold. Over the course of a week, researchers collected sleep data from more than XNUMX people who were given a special wrist device that recorded body movements during sleep; in addition, the participants in the experiment also recorded the time when they went to bed and when they woke up.

Participants were then given a nasal spray containing the rhinovirus that causes colds and put into a hotel where they stayed for five days. Before a person injected a solution of the virus into his nose, a blood test was taken from him to determine the level of already existing antibodies to the infection - it is obvious that if their level was initially high enough (that is, the immune system remembered what to do with a cold), then the disease receded quickly. Those with immune systems already ready to face a cold had to be withdrawn from the study: even if they got sick, they would recover too quickly, and sleep here would hardly have played any significant role in resisting the virus.

Whether infection occurred or not was monitored by external symptoms (runny nose, etc.) and with the help of special tests. For example, a special dye was instilled into the patient's nose and the time it took for it to reach the throat was measured; if it took about 35 minutes, then the airways were noticeably inflamed and swollen, and the disease was therefore on the rise. Along the way, samples of the nasal mucosa were taken, in which the concentration of the virus and antibodies against it were measured.

The likelihood of catching a cold was compared to how long a person sleeps. The quality of sleep was also taken into account here: if the sleep was restless, then in total the sleep time turned out to be less than during a quiet sleep, even if both subjects went to bed and got up at the same time. It turned out that if you sleep less than 5 hours or 5-6 hours at night, then the probability of getting seriously ill with a cold will be 4,5 and 4,2 times higher, respectively, than if you sleep 6-7 hours or more.

Sleep obviously helps the immune system in some way. It can be assumed that sleep helps fight other infections, not just the cold virus, however, more research will be needed to confirm this.

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