What Does It Mean to Be a Lemming?

Tribe of rodents of the family unit Cricetidae

Lemming
Kingdom of norway lemming (Lemmus lemmus)
Scientific nomenclature
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Order:	Rodentia
Family:	Cricetidae
Subfamily:	Arvicolinae
Groups included
Dicrostonychini – collared lemmings Lagurini – steppe lemmings Lemmini – true lemmings
Cladistically included merely traditionally excluded taxa
Arvicolini Ellobiusini – mole voles Myodini Ondatrini – muskrats Phenacomyini – tree and heather voles Pliomyini Prometheomyini

A lemming is a small rodent, usually plant in or well-nigh the Arctic in tundra biomes. Lemmings course the subfamily Arvicolinae (also known every bit Microtinae) together with voles and muskrats, which course function of the superfamily Muroidea, which also includes rats, mice, hamsters, and gerbils. In pop culture, a longstanding myth holds that they bound off cliffs and commit mass suicide.

Description and habitat [edit]

Lemmings measure around xiii–xviii cm (5–7 in) in length and counterbalance around 23–34 k (0.8–one.2 oz). Lemmings are quite rounded in shape, with brown and black, long, soft fur. They have a very short tail, a stubby, hairy snout, brusque legs, and small-scale ears. They have a flattened claw on the first digit of their front feet, which helps them to dig in the snow. They are herbivorous, feeding more often than not on mosses and grasses. They also fodder through the snowfall surface to find berries, leaves, shoots, roots, bulbs, and lichens.^[1] Lemmings choose their preferred dietary vegetation disproportionately to its occurrence in their habitat.^[two] They digest grasses and sedges less finer than related voles.^[iii] Like other rodents, their incisors grow continuously, allowing them to feed on much tougher forage.^{[ description needed ]} Lemmings do not hibernate through the harsh northern winter. They remain active, finding food by burrowing through the snowfall. These rodents live in big tunnel systems beneath the snow in winter, which protect them from predators. Their burrows have rest areas, toilet areas, and nesting rooms. They make nests out of grasses, feathers, and muskox wool (qiviut). In the leap, they motility to college ground, where they live on mountain heaths or in forests, continuously breeding before returning in autumn to the tundra.

Behaviour [edit]

Like many other rodents, lemmings have periodic population booms and and so disperse in all directions, seeking food and shelter their natural habitats cannot provide. The Kingdom of norway lemming and brown lemming are 2 of the few vertebrates which reproduce and then speedily that their population fluctuations are cluttered,^{[4] [5]} rather than following linear growth to a carrying capacity or regular oscillations. Why lemming populations fluctuate with such neat variance roughly every iv years, before numbers drop to near extinction, is non known.^[6] Lemming behaviour and advent are markedly dissimilar from those of other rodents, which are inconspicuously coloured and endeavour to conceal themselves from their predators. Lemmings, past contrast, are conspicuously coloured and acquit aggressively toward predators and even human observers. The lemming defence organisation is thought to be based on aposematism (warning display).^[7] Fluctuations in the lemming population affect the behaviour of predators, and may fuel irruptions of birds of casualty such every bit snowy owls to areas farther south.^[8] For many years, the population of lemmings was believed to change with the population wheel, but now some show suggests their predators' populations, particularly those of the stoat, may be more than closely involved in irresolute the lemming population.^{[ citation needed ]}

Misconceptions [edit]

Misconceptions almost lemmings go back many centuries. In the 1530s, geographer Zeigler of Strasbourg proposed the theory that the creatures brutal out of the sky during stormy weather condition^[ix] and and so died suddenly when the grass grew in jump.^[10] This description was contradicted by natural historian Ole Worm, who accepted that lemmings could fall out of the sky, merely claimed that they had been brought over past the current of air rather than created by spontaneous generation. Worm published dissections of a lemming, which showed that they are anatomically like to almost other rodents such as voles and hamsters, and the work of Carl Linnaeus proved that they had a natural origin.

Lemmings take become the subject area of a widely popular misconception that they are driven to commit mass suicide when they migrate by jumping off cliffs. Information technology is not a deliberate mass suicide, in which animals voluntarily choose to die, only 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 cantankerous a torso of h2o in search of a new habitat. In such cases, many drown if the body of h2o is an ocean or is then broad every bit to exceed their concrete capabilities. Thus, the unexplained fluctuations in the population of Norwegian lemmings, and perhaps a pocket-sized corporeality of semantic defoliation (suicide not beingness limited to voluntary deliberation, but besides the result of foolishness), helped requite rise to the popular stereotype of the suicidal lemmings, particularly after this behaviour was staged in the Walt Disney documentary White Wilderness in 1958.^[11] The misconception itself is much older, dating back to at to the lowest degree the belatedly 19th century. In the August 1877 consequence of Popular Science Monthly, apparently suicidal lemmings are presumed to be pond the Atlantic Ocean in search of the submerged continent of Lemuria.^[12]

Another myth may have roots in the fiercely ambitious nature of lemmings during population booms, and the corresponding leftovers of predatory frenzies: lemmings do not explode.^[11]

Nomenclature [edit]

• Order Rodentia
  • Superfamily Muroidea
    • Family Cricetidae
      • Subfamily Arvicolinae: voles, lemmings, and related species
        • Tribe Dicrostonychini
          • Dicrostonyx
            • Northern collared lemming (D. groenlandicus)
            • Ungava collared lemming (D. hudsonius)
            • Nelson's collared lemming (D. nelsoni)
            • Ogilvie Mountains collared lemming (D. nunatakensis)
            • Richardson's collared lemming (D. richardsoni)
            • Arctic lemming (D. torquatus)
            • Unalaska collared lemming (D. unalascensis)
        • Tribe Lemmini
          • Lemmus
            • Amur lemming (50. amurensis)
            • Norway lemming (L. lemmus)
            • Beringian lemming (50. nigripes)
            • East Siberian lemming (50. paulus)
            • Westward Siberian lemming (L. sibiricus)
            • Due north American brown lemming (L. trimucronatus)
          • Myopus
            • Wood lemming (Chiliad. schisticolor)
          • Synaptomys
            • Northern bog lemming (Due south. borealis)
            • Southern bog lemming (S. cooperi)
        • Tribe Lagurini
          • Eolagurus
            • Yellow steppe lemming (E. luteus)
            • Przewalski's steppe lemming (E. przewalskii)
          • Lagurus
            • Steppe lemming (50. lagurus)

In popular culture and media [edit]

The misconception of lemming "mass suicide" is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors.

It was well plenty known to be mentioned in "The Marching Morons", a 1951 short story by Cyril M. Kornbluth.

In 1955, Disney Studio illustrator Carl Barks drew an Uncle Scrooge take a chance comic with the title "The Lemming with the Locket". This comic, which was inspired past a 1953 American Mercury article, showed massive numbers of lemmings jumping over Norwegian cliffs.^{[13] [xiv]}

Lemmings also announced in Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 brusque story "The Possessed", where their suicidal urges are attributed to the lingering consciousness of an alien group heed, which had inhabited the species in the prehistoric past.^[15]

Perhaps the about influential and, for the lemmings involved, tragic, presentation of the myth was the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness which won an Academy Award for Documentary Characteristic and in which producers threw lemmings off a cliff to their deaths to simulated footage of a "mass suicide", too as faked scenes of mass migration.^[16] A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary, Cruel Camera, found the lemmings used for White Wilderness were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where far from "casting themselves bodily out into infinite" (every bit the moving picture'south narrator states), they were, in fact, dumped off the cliff by the camera crew from a truck.^{[17] [18]} Because of the limited number of lemmings at their disposal, which in whatever case were the wrong subspecies, the migration scenes were simulated using tight camera angles and a big, snow-covered turntable.

The song "Lemmings (Including 'Cog')" from the 1971 album Pawn Hearts by progressive rock ring Van der Graaf Generator is about a person who sees their loved ones "crashing on quite blindly to the sea".^[19]

In 1991, a puzzle-platform video game called Lemmings was released, in which the player must save a certain per centum of the titular small humanoid creatures as they march heedlessly through a dangerous environment. The game became quite popular and has been through several versions up to the present day.

In 2006, the German Fun Metal, One-act Stone, and Neue Deutsche Härte band Knorkator produced the comedy stone song Wir werden alle sterben (Eng.: We are all going to die) in 2006. The lyrics country that all signs bespeak that we are all going to dice presently, possibly even today. Too a child sings some parts stating that this might also happen during brushing teeth, making it more than funny but dark. The lyrics exercise non mention whatever lemmings, but the music video (available freely on YouTube^[20]) shows some creatures which are clearly supposed to be lemmings dying in different situations. The video starts with the typical visualization of these lemmings lining up walking to and over a cliff (which, while falling to their deaths, happily sing about the political party coming to an end).

Lemmings are main characters of the 2016 French animated television serial Grizzy and the Lemmings. Equally a humorous allusion to the popular myth, the serial oft features lemmings jumping down from elevated platforms.

In the animated Disney film Zootopia (2016) lemmings are employed as investment bankers of Lemmings Brothers. They are exceptionally decumbent to herd instinct, including mass suicide.

References [edit]

1. ^ Soininen, Eeva; Zinger, Lucie; Gielly, Ludovic; Yoccoz, Nigel; Henden, John-André; Ims, Rolf (4 April 2017). "Not only mosses: lemming wintertime diets every bit described by DNA metabarcoding". Polar Biology. 40 (10): 2097–2103. doi:10.1007/s00300-017-2114-3. hdl:10037/12365. S2CID 43524891.
2. ^ Batzli, George O; Pitelka, Frank A (1983). "Nutritional Ecology of Microtine Rodents: Food Habits of Lemmings near Barrow, Alaska". Journal of Mammalogy. 64 (4): 648–655. doi:10.2307/1380521. JSTOR 1380521.
3. ^ Batzli, George O; Cole, F Russell (1979). "Nutritional Ecology of Microtine Rodents: Digestibility of Forage". Journal of Mammalogy. 60 (four): 740–750. doi:x.2307/1380189. JSTOR 1380189.
4. ^ Turchin, Peter (2003). Circuitous Population Dynamics: A Theoretical/Empirical Synthesis. Princeton University Press. p. 391. ISBN978-0-691-09021-4.
5. ^ Stenseth, N. C.; Chan, M. S.; Framstad, E.; Tong, H. (1998). "Phase- and density-dependent population dynamics in Norwegian lemmings: Interaction between deterministic and stochastic processes". Proceedings. Biological Sciences. 265 (1409): 1957–68. doi:10.1098/rspb.1998.0526. JSTOR 51151. PMC1689487. PMID 9821362.
6. ^ Hinterland Who's Who – Lemmings Archived 2011-11-07 at the Wayback Car
7. ^ Andersson, Malte (1976). "Lemmus lemmus: A Possible Case of Aposematic Coloration and Behavior". Periodical of Mammalogy. 57 (3): 461–469. doi:10.2307/1379296. JSTOR 1379296.
8. ^ Fears, Darryl (24 Feb 2014). "Lemmings fuel biggest snowy-owl migration in 50 years". The Guardian . Retrieved 9 March 2018.
9. ^ This notion is also featured in the folklore of the Inupiat and Yupik peoples at Norton Sound.
10. ^ "Lemmings Suicide Myth". ABC Science. Karl S. Kruszelnicki Pty Ltd. 27 Apr 2004. Archived from the original on fourteen July 2007.
11. ^ ^{a b} Nicholls, Henry (21 Nov 2014). "The truth nearly Norwegian lemmings". BBC World. Archived from the original on 24 November 2014. Retrieved 9 June 2019.
12. ^ Crotch, William Duppa (Baronial 1877). "The Norwegian Lemming and its Migrations". Pop Science Monthly. D. Appleton & Company. Vol. 11. pp.412-413 – via Wikisource.
13. ^ Lederer, Muriel. "Render of the Pied Piper". The American Mercury, Dec. 1953, pp. 33–34.
14. ^ Blum, Geoffrey. (1996). "One Billion of Something", in: Uncle Scrooge Adventures by Carl Barks, #ix.
15. ^ Clarke, Arthur C. (2001). The Nerveless Stories of Arthur C. Clarke. Tor Books. pp. 423–427. ISBN978-0-575-07065-3.
16. ^ "'White Wilderness' Faked Lemming Suicides". Snopes.com. 12 Dec 2015.
17. ^ Savage Camera Archived 2009-01-17 at the Wayback Machine Time slice: 14:01–xv:27
18. ^ Moss, Tyler (10 June 2013). "Practise Lemmings Really Run Off Cliffs to Their Death?". Mental Floss. Archived from the original on 7 April 2014.
19. ^ Van der Graaf Generator – Lemmings , retrieved 2020-06-fourteen
20. ^ "KNORKATOR - Wir werden (OFFICIAL VIDEO)". YouTube.

External links [edit]

Await up lemming in Wiktionary, the complimentary dictionary.

• "The Lemming Cycle" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2005-12-23(92.6 KiB). {{cite web}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link) Commodity by Nils Christian Stenseth on the population cycles of lemmings and other northern rodents.
• "Collared Lemming" (PDF) (177 KiB). {{cite spider web}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link) Commodity about Collared Lemming, see besides the main page on Alaskan mammals.
• Rebuttal of lemming suicide:
  • Alaska Wildlife News.
  • Lemmings, dying on camera (via Wayback Machine).

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming

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