Do lemmings really commit suicide? Think about it.

After hearing about the lemming suicides I wanted to search more about them. So,first of all I searched what are those interesting creatures. What are Lemmings? They are small rodents which live in the Artic. Having that clear, I started looking for deeper information about their suicide behavior.

First of all, I found an interesting scene in the documentary White Wilderness, that supports the idea about the suicide. According to the documentary this is caused by the overpopulation of this rodents, they feel frustrated and tried to look for a new place to live, but not having in mind the climate and soil conditions. So they drop to the ocean and after a time they feel tired and die. However, it was found that these specially scene was created and the scenarios, I mean, the place where the film had part didn't accord to the place where the lemmings live, so it was a made up scene for the Disney's documentary. A filthy trick in my opinion.

Nevertheless, I didn't really trust in this information so I decided to look up for more.. And I discovered the truth, as I see. Well, this misconception has transcended for many years, since the documentary, which was made 1958, fifty-four years of fake information! But the truth it's more difficult to understand... Here's some of what I read:

Lemmings aren't suicidal. Some researches collected data for over fifteen years, they found that the populations of the rodents increase from a hundreds to over 1000, that makes the predator number to increase, which cause the number of the population to fall. After this, comes the lack of lemmings that cause the same effect, a low number of predators. This is called "Predator-prey cycles", this cycle take place every four years. 

At least lemmings have good jumps. Might a Front Flip or a Reverse help?

The study was published in Thursday's issue of the weekly U.S. journal Science by Olivier Gilg and Ilkka Hanski of the University of Finland, and Benoit Sittler of the University of Freiburg in Germany.

Finally, the truth was released. It's fake the myth of the suicide lemmings. They just suffer the episodes of overpopulation, and so on. So before believing in sometimes that we're not sure about. We should make a deep research, you never know what coul happen if we still believe in this misconceptions. We have to open our mind and think before act.

Here's an interesting video with interviews of this topic. Enjoy it!

Source: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20031027/lemmings.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming