How do lemmings die? Detailed answer

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How do lemmings die? Detailed answer

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Did you know?

How do lemmings die?

No, they don't commit mass suicide - if that's what you're thinking.

Apparently, we owe the idea of suicide to the scientific work of naturalists of the XNUMXth century, who observed (but never understood) the four-year "boom-bust" population cycle of the Norwegian lemming (Lemmus lemmus).

Lemmings have a phenomenal ability to reproduce. One female can give up to eighty offspring annually. Sudden bursts of lemmings even led the Scandinavians to believe that they spontaneously breed when the weather is favorable. What actually happens is that mild winters lead to overpopulation, which in turn leads to overgrazing. In search of food, lemmings go to explore uncharted territories and go until they stumble upon a natural obstacle like an abyss, lake or sea. And the rears are pushing. There is panic and confusion. There are also accidents. But it's not suicide.

There is another, side myth: that the whole idea of mass suicide was invented in the Disney film The White Wasteland (1958). The truth here is that the film was an absolute fake. It was filmed in the Canadian province of Alberta, surrounded by land and never seen lemmings, the animal actors had to be transported as far as Manitoba, several hundred miles away. The "mass migration" footage was taken with a dozen lemmings on a snow-strewn turntable. And the famous final scene (where the lemmings throw themselves into the sea under Winston Hibbler's tragic voice-over, filled with hopelessness: "The last chance to turn, but you can't stop them; one more step - and their bodies break into a bottomless abyss") was filmed without much fanfare at all: the filmmakers simply threw the poor fellows into the river.

However, Disney is only guilty of trying to recreate a story already ingrained in our brains. Here is how it is described in the most influential children's textbook of the early 1908th century, Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia, published in XNUMX: water and causing typhus ... forward and forward, to the sea, and further - into the water, to their own death ... It's terrible and sad, but if it weren't for such a sad outcome, lemmings would have swallowed up all of Europe long ago.

Author: John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

Are there seas on the Moon?

Yes, at least in name. These are relatively flat flat areas of the lunar surface, on which, of course, there is no water. Astronomers of the Middle Ages believed that large dark areas on the Moon were seas similar to those on Earth, and gave them the appropriate names (Sea of Tranquility, Ocean of Storms, etc.), which have survived to this day.

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