And while the odd calamities lemming might blunder off a cliff, or be thrown by TV producers, there’s zero evidence they’ve ever tried to kill themselves. So to summarise, a very dynamic population size has led to the many myths about lemmings. But the ones that survive get back to their breeding in a brave new world. This mass migration can involve travelling down steep hills or swimming across small bodies of water, and sometimes lemmings might fall or drown. Plus, when it’s too crowded herds of lemmings will migrate to pastures new. of Fish and Game has a webpage devoted to dispelling the lemming myth. And when there are too many lemmings their numbers will start to drop they run out of food they’re picked off by predators, and many of the infants are killed by males. It looked as if the lemmings were simply jumping off of a cliff into the ocean. And when it’s cold lemmings can survive underneath the snow where they can breed safely before suddenly appearing in spring as if from nowhere. Norwegian lemmings are fast breeders if the environment is forgiving the numbers will increase dramatically. But the deception has been exposed and safely assuming they aren’t spontaneously appearing in clouds or exploding we still need to explain this sudden appearance and disappearance of these lemmings.Įven now, we don’t have the whole story but we have many parts of the puzzle. The producers having fallen for the legend themselves wanted to include it in their documentary, but after they couldn’t see it for real they imported a whole bunch of lemmings and threw them off the cliff themselves.Īpart from contributing to the untimely and unnecessary deaths of some of Mickey Mouse’s close cousins this Academy Award winning documentary cemented the lemming myth in people’s minds for many years.
It certainly distressed me that these lemmings didn’t jump - they were pushed. Well, here’s the rub and this may be distressing to some listeners. In 1950 Disney filmed a documentary called White Wilderness, and they got some never before seen footage of some lemmings hurling themselves off a cliff to their doom.
The cliff jumping behaviour would die out.īut there’s a reason this paradoxical plunging is still so widely believed - it was actually caught on camera. A selfless and suicidal lemming would be taken out of gene pool, while a selfish lemming who didn’t follow the crowd would have lots of babies and reproduce successfully. footage of lemmings jumping off cliffs was later found. And it should do as, evolutionary speaking, it makes absolutely no sense. Lemmings Use Loud Barks Ferocious Bites And Bold Colors To Scare Off. Lemmings can swim and when their territories are overpopulated will cross bodies. Lemmings don’t migrate, they disperse when overpopulated and they don’t voluntarily leap into large water bodies, although they might do so by accident. And the theory that still sticks to this day was that for the greater good of the species when the population grew too big the altruistic lemmings would run, in hoards, off of cliffs and drown themselves. Answer (1 of 46): This is a completely manufactured urban myth.
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