Lemming Suicide Myth: Disney Film Faked Bogus Behavior

The scene may have been staged, but Wiki's entry on them suggests the demonstrated behavior is completely authentic, instead taking a more semantic argument about the term suicide:

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"Lemmings have become the subject of a widely popular misconception that they are driven to commit mass suicide when they migrate by jumping off cliffs. It is not a deliberate mass suicide, in which animals voluntarily choose to die, but rather a result of their migratory behavior. Driven by strong biological urges, some species of lemmings may migrate in large groups when population density becomes too great. They can swim and may choose to cross a body of water in search of a new habitat. In such cases, many drown if the body of water is an ocean or is so wide as to exceed their physical capabilities. Thus, the unexplained fluctuations in the population of Norwegian lemmings, and perhaps a small amount of semantic confusion (suicide not being limited to voluntary deliberation, but also the result of foolishness), helped give rise to the popular stereotype of the suicidal lemmings, particularly after this behaviour was staged in the Walt Disney documentary White Wilderness in 1958.[12] The misconception itself is much older, dating back to at least the late 19th century. In the August 1877 issue of Popular Science Monthly, apparently suicidal lemmings are presumed to be swimming the Atlantic Ocean in search of the submerged continent of Lemuria.[13]"

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The Disney Film narrated the event (from the article) as, "A kind of compulsion seizes each tiny rodent and, carried along by an unreasoning hysteria, each falls into step for a march that will take them to a strange destiny. That destiny is to jump into the ocean. As they approach the sea, they've become victims of an obsession -- a one-track thought: Move on! Move on!"

That does not seem especially inaccurate.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming

The article mentions that, "If they get wet to the skin, they 're essentially dead." Reading the Wiki on them, they're quite a bizarre little species in countless ways. Highly recommended. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming

Maybe I'm wrong but I read that to mean that if they get completely soaked in extreme winter weather, they'll die. This doesn't seem so bizarre. Some animals, both mammals and birds, have some protection against this because their hair/feathers are both greasy and help them keep "air cushions" that prevent water from completely soaking the body -- but if that ever happens in cold weather the animal is as good as dead, since it'll die of hypothermia before it gets dry.

I may be wrong though.

Disney is an extreme offender here (I mean, dropping lemmings off a cliff, what where they thinking?), but I hear some of what we "know" about animals is sometimes an honest mistake and may be the result of an involuntary artifacts of researcher involvement.

Don't know if it's true, but a couple of examples I've read:

It's not true that wolves live in "packs" and that there are alpha and beta males. In truth wolves form families of the breeding couple and their cubs, and that's it. Saying daddy and mommy wolf are the "alphas" is a trivial assertion. But apparently this dynamic is broken for wolves in captivity, and the artificial alpha/beta thing arises.

Female praying mantises do not regularly chomp on the male's head while mating. It's true they are highly cannibalistic and will eat another mantis if they can, but while mating the males usually have tactics to avoid this fate; it's only under observation by researchers that the female gets more aggressive and the male less prone to escaping.

Not sure if either is true, but I'm willing to entertain the notion they may be.

One good thing that came out of this myth, at least. That game is awesome.