The rodent is affected by climate change because increasing freeze-thaw cycles in the fall season mean it can't get to seeds or roots buried by ice. What lemmings are up to at this time of year is still a bit of a mystery to locals and researchers, but they are most likely reproducing.Ī lemming is pictured in Iqaluit, Nunavut.
The scene was staged, but it still led some to believe that lemmings follow each other en masse over cliffs to their death. In the film, lemmings throw themselves off of a cliff into the Arctic Ocean.
"They have never been known to jump off cliffs in suicide," he said, referring to a scene from the 1958 Walt Disney documentary White Wilderness. Both to travel under and stay warm in –40 C temperatures. Lemmings need deep snow this time of year. Grass and willow, some of the favourite foods of lemmings, poked through. Kovic stood on thin snow in an open space on the edge of Iqaluit. That's Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit ," said the Iqaluit hunter and elder. "One thing everybody seems to believe that they jump off cliffs when they're abundant. Follow him at ken-jennings.Ben Kovic wants to quash any myths about lemmings. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Ken Jennings is the author of Because I Said So!, Brainiac, Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac, and Maphead. Quick Quiz: DMA Design, the company that sold 20 million Lemmings video games in the 1990s, has had even more success since 1997, the year that it created what other game franchise? Say what you want about the manipulations of modern reality TV, but at least The Bachelor never threw dozens of women off a helicopter to their deaths. And the ones seen “jumping” had actually been thrown off a cliff by a documentary crew! Wow. The lemmings in a “migrating” frenzy were actually being spun on a snowy turntable.
#Myth of lemmings jumping off cliffs tv#
“Over they go,” laments the narrator, “casting themselves out bodily into space!” In fact, a 1983 investigation by a Canadian TV producer revealed that the scenes (shot in landlocked Alberta!) had been faked. In rock star terms: a “Brian Jones” rather than a “Kurt Cobain.”Ī whole generation of nature buffs got its lemming knowledge from a 1958 Disney documentary called White Wilderness, which did indeed depict a pack of lemmings running across the Canadian snow and then leaping to their deaths in the ocean. But that’s not the kind of kamikaze behavior we think of as classically “lemming-like.” It’s a tragic accident. The tiny mammals do move in large groups, and when the group reaches a natural barrier, like an icy river, a few lead lemmings may be inadvertently swept into the current by the rest of the pack. The State of Alaska has a whole website on the subject (okay…) in which a zoologist blames the myth on the lemmings’ migratory behavior. The myth about lemming suicide plunges is over sixty years old, but it’s bogus.
Unfortunately for you (but fortunately for the lemmings), the one thing you know about them is wrong. Most of their cousins, like voles and marmots, have no metaphorical function in modern discourse whatsoever. It’s their only cultural relevance whatsoever. This behavior is the only reason video games get made about lemmings.
The Debunker: Do Lemmings Commit Mass Suicide?Ĭhances are you know only one thing about the tiny rodents called lemmings: that they jump off cliffs to their watery deaths during migrations. In honor of our small woodland friends, most of whom are probably hibernating right now, Ken will spend the month of January gnawing away at all the rodent-related facts you only thought you knew. Did you know that January 21 is Squirrel Appreciation Day? Or that David Seville of “The Chipmunks” fame was born on January 27? By the end of this month, of course, the most famous rodent-related day on the calendar, Groundhog Day, will be just hours away.
#Myth of lemmings jumping off cliffs full#
It’s now 2014, a full decade since Jeopardy! made Ken Jennings mildly famous, but he’s still waging his tireless war against misinformation in our weekly “Debunker” column.
0 kommentar(er)
