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“There’s no animal that commits suicide, it’s a biologically impossible concept. They have monitored the lemmings by putting tiny radio transmitters around their necks both inside and outside a fenced 25-acre enclosure at the Pearce Point research station 600 miles north of Yellowknife. Krebs and co-researcher Don Reid have spent the last five years studying lemmings at a government-financed research station on the Arctic Ocean in Canada’s Northwest Territories. You have situations where the females will kill the babies next door,” Krebs said. They will also kill each other, if they have the opportunity. These animals are so aggressive to one another they will kill each other’s offspring. University of British Columbia zoology professor Charles Krebs said the oversexed rodents kill each other as feverishly as they breed in a four-year cycle that forms the basis of the Arctic food chain.
#Lemmings jumping off cliffs myth disney serial#
Follow him at ken-jennings.Canadian researchers believe that lemmings, popularly portrayed as victims of mass suicide, are actually serial killers who think nothing of murdering their neighbors’ babies. 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.
#Lemmings jumping off cliffs myth disney 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.
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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.
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