What are lemmings?
Lemmings are small Arctic rodents. They are subniveal animals, meaning they spend most of their time in and underneath the snow pack. They do not hibernate, they live alone except for mating and they can be rather fierce when confronted.
Oh yeah, and they’re best known for their tendency to commit mass suicide.
So pervasive is the idea that lemmings jump off cliffs, the imagery has been used in everything from political cartoons and video games to dystopian Apple ads. (Really makes you want to buy a computer, huh?)
So Why Do Lemmings Jump Off Cliffs to their Deaths?
They don’t. Not even a little bit. And you can blame Walt Disney for making you look stupid all these years.
Let’s back up a smidge. Lemming folklore dates back as far as the 1530s. Northern folk noticed an explosion in the population every few years followed by a rapid decline, as though the varmints appeared with the wind and then went extinct.
The prevailing theory of the time was dreamt up by some “geographer” known only as “Zeigler of Strasbourg.” Ziggy, as I’ve chosen to nickname him, believed lemmings fell out of the sky during storms. Allegedly, they then died as the spring grass sprouted. Ziggy should have stuck to geography.
A few centuries later, we now think lemming populations fluctuate due to a variety of factors, including variation in climate, predation and vole population. (More voles mean more food for predators and less chance the feisty lemmings turn into lunch.) Once the boom is on, the horde of rodents consumes all available food in an area until it’s forced to look elsewhere, like locusts. Such migrations drive the little rascals into unknown territory.
Sometimes, they Sly Stallone it, venturing over cliffs in search of tasty morsels. (Note: this does not mean lemmings cliff dive, like the myth claims or the video below depicts.) Lemmings swim well enough and are frequently seen crossing lakes and streams. But little bodies have their limits and they have been known to die from exhaustion when attempting to ford large bodies of water.
So lemmings have it kind of rough during a population bump, but let’s be clear: at no point do the little beasts just say, “F— it, I’m out.”
Which means… if lemmings aren’t jumping off cliffs – *Puts on Lame Sunglasses* – someone must be bringing cliffs to the lemmings. (YEEEAAAAAAHHHH!)
Walt Disney: Lemming Murderer
Frozen Planet (2011), Life (2009), Planet Earth (2006), Blue Planet (2001) – in just a decade, wildlife documentaries such as these have carried the ball forward again and again, each series building on the technology, scope and promise of the last. They inspire and amaze. They teach and enlighten. And they spoil us beyond words.*
It’s almost impossible to imagine a world of wildlife programming before high definition, slow-motion, stop-motion and time-lapse. But it existed. Many of us grew up with Marty Stouffer, Jack Hanna and Steve Irwin. And before them, there was Walt Disney.
When wildlife documentary was cutting its teeth back in the 1950s and 60s, standards didn’t really exist. Filmmakers routinely captured animals and conjured narratives. It was nothing to stage entire scenes. For example, when the cute polar bear cub tumbles and slides down a mountainside in Disney’s “White Wilderness” (1958), what you don’t know is that the cub was tossed, by the film crew, down the freaking mountain.
In the same film, you can witness the birth of a meme – the stupid, suicidal lemming.
Yeah, couldn’t be more false. The lemmings you see above don’t even live where this was filmed. “Disney paid kids in Churchill, Manitoba, to catch lemmings, then transported them to non-habitat in Alberta where a turntable flung them off a cliff and into ‘the sea’ by the dozens,” according to Ted Williams (the excellent nature writer, not the baseball player or hobo crooner). Note that Ted puts ‘the sea’ in quotes, because province of Alberta is landlocked. Nor does it have a sea.
Anyhoot, you could argue these films raised awareness for the genre and the animals sacrificed to build it. Or you could qualify it all by saying it was the 50s and people were less inclined to care about such things. (This is only four years after Brown vs. the Board of Education and widespread desegregation, who gives a cuss about lemmings?)
Or you could go with the Disney movie’s all-knowing voiceover, “It’s not given to man to understand all of nature’s mysteries.”
Bittel Me More: Mountainfit
Meera Lee Sethi is an inquisitive nonfiction writer and part-time skinner of birds. Her latest release, Mountainfit, is “a little book of essays about birds, science, myth, and the mountains of Sweden.” It’s also got a delightful chapter on lemmings and how “good lemming years” affect both bird researchers and the psyche of the local Northfolk.
On the Norway lemming:
There is a real-life Reepicheep, that C.S. Lewis mouse- warrior whose tiny stature belies his outsize valor. His name is lemmus lemmus.
The Norway lemming is a small, mountain-living rodent with a conspicuous patchwork of yellow, cinnamon-brown, and jet-black fur. It has flat, round ears, an uproar of white whiskers, pink-clawed feet, and a tail so short and stubby as to be irrelevant. The lemming feeds on the mosses, sedges, grasses, and willow shrubs that flourish in the sub-arctic tundra regions where it lives—an ascetic sort of diet which does not appear to prevent it from growing appealingly rotund. Yet even the largest individual would fit quite comfortably—if not at all quietly—inside your cupped and waiting hand.
On the subnivean space:
In winter, lemmings live invisibly in a space called subnivean; a sliver of in-between universe that forms when topsoil, still warm from seasons before, melts the snow just above it. Loosened into softer, less closely packed crystals, this partially defrosted layer of ice becomes an ideal tunneling medium for tiny, clawed feet. Here lemmus lemmus digs long, serpentine trackways, feeds on buried vegetation, breathes buried air and, protected from both freezing temperatures and the attacks of predators by the crust of snow above it, begins the vital task of breeding.
It’s beautiful. And I promise, it’s the best $5 you’ll spend today.
*Is anyone else sick of penguins? I feel spoiled saying it, the poor Frozen Planet guys braved subzero temperatures and torrential wind speeds on the bottom of the world for years on end and yet… it’s just sort of the same ridiculous trek every time. It’s still unbelievable, don’t get me wrong, but I think I’m just penguined out. Documentary filmmakers beware, such is the pampered state of the modern viewer.
Image credits: Puffball on Ice, Lemming Hard Times, Lemming Murder, Angry Lemming
