Lemmings

Play the 8-bit nintendo game "Lemmings" for a more accurate understanding of lemmings jumping off cliffs into water, buzzsaws, lava, dirt and rocks

nintendo is my basis for all true myths

 

A bit more on how the lemming myth apparently got started here.

 

It isn't Lemmings that jump off cliffs - it's slayers (from BG2) dressed up!

Play through SoA, you'll understand what I mean.

That is just wrong
Poor things.

 

"One of the best examples of how humans stage animal scenes for their own entertainment and anthroprudism (more beetle) is Walt Disney's 1958 nature documentary 'White Wilderness'. After this show humans widely believed that lemmings committed suicide, and on a massive scale. The filming took place in Alberta, Canada. But when the film crew got there, they found no lemmings and no examples of suicide. The lemming's natural habitat is northern Canada, Alaska, Siberia and Scandinavia. Not to be dissuaded, the principal photographer (James Simon) and crew went down the unfortunate path of story fabrication. They paid Inuit children from Manitoba 25 cents for every lemming they could catch.

They then placed the lemmings on a large turntable, like a 'merry-go-round' hidden with snow, and got the lemmings running. With some imaginative camera angles and editing, they made a few dozen lemmings look like thousands migrating and rushing to a scene even more startling. After the migration sequence, the lemmings were collected and taken to a cliff top overlooking a river. The documentary crew crouched down hidden from the cameras, and pushed the lemmings over the edge of the cliff to their death in the rushing water below. The myth of lemming suicide turned from fable to money-spinning 'fact'.


Of course, wild animals don't commit suicide. Their quality of life and freedom is better than humans understand. But lemmings have an interesting biology that might appear to lead to population control through suicide. They are small rodents about 120 cm long, feed on plants and mosses, and during the winter live in burrows under the snow.



They can produce masses of offspring when conditions are right. They become sexually mature after a month, and produce about 10 offspring in each litter. With up to seven litters per year the numbers soon multiply. Every four years or so, their numbers build so much that overcrowding triggers a mass migration to search for new land. Travelling in large numbers over land is risky, and many starve or are eaten by predators. Lemmings can swim, but some do drown accidentally in the water. Hence, a grain of truth behind part of the Disney fabrication. But drowning is by accident not suicide. This boom and bust lifestyle might seem a strange path to follow. But lemmings need to be able to take rapid advantage of food supplies when it becomes available. Several animals living in harsh environments follow this strategy. Locusts in arid regions breed in large numbers when conditions are right, even though the population will crash when ill weather comes or the food runs out. In contrast, conditions in rainforests are far more stable, so you rarely see any one species building up in such numbers."

 

No matter what anyone says, lemmings are those creepy little green dudes that do exactly as told from the games. Logic and science can only try to prove otherwise.

 

120 cm long? I doubt it

Still, now that the myth behind the Lemming's suicidial attitude is revealed, what's the deal with those penguin-like jolly things that were in the movie Ice Age? You know, the ones that got so excited about some egg they all happily ran down a cliff after one another. What's the story with that idea?

 

Well, they are dodos, and here in the US, we use the name "dodo" to describe people who are just plain stupid, i am sure it is because of some myth that the actual dodos (now extinct) were stupid. I guess they look kind of silly, and so it works.