In addition, shortly after this population explosion happens, their population begins a very steep decline to near extinction, probably giving credence to the fact that all the lemmings banded together and migrated to their deaths in the water. When enough of them try to disperse to whatever far shore and fail, the dead lemmings will pile up on the beach, perhaps giving the impression they committed mass suicide in some sort of frenzied group migration. There are even documented cases of this where massive numbers of them will drown in the attempt to reach a shore that was too far for them or if the water was too choppy, they can die from that, even though the distance wasn’t too far. So in their quest to spread out, they will occasionally choose to try to swim to another place and many die in the attempt, only to be washed up on shore later. And actually, given their size (about the size of a mouse or hamster), they can swim a pretty incredible distance (about 200 meters or around 600 feet). When they are dispersing, they often do find themselves in the water. But this is just because there are so many of them, they aren’t actually traveling together. When this dispersal to new areas happens, they can sometimes appear to be traveling in large groups. When the lemmings are in the upswing where they are massively overpopulated, they tend to go into a phase where they like to spread out and disperse to new areas where food is more plentiful and there is less competition for that food. The standard theory is that it simply has to do with available food sources, predators, and the harsh environment they live in (often in extremely cold regions like Northern Alaska and the like). This actually happens in a semi-regular cycle of about three to four years and, to date, nobody knows exactly why. However, lemmings can literally go from massively overpopulated in a certain area to near extinction within a couple year period and then back to massively overpopulated very quickly. Lemmings actually prefer to be on their own, only getting together to mate when food is plentiful. The theory behind why they would commit this mass suicide, as explained by narrator Winston Hibler, is that they get worked up from the frenzy of running with all the other thousands of lemmings: “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.” He then proceeds to explain how they are approaching the sea, which is actually just a river because Alberta is landlocked at which point, driven by their hysteria, they cast themselves into the sea. The next scene was of the dead lemmings floating in the water. Once they got all the shots they needed, they then used the turntable to launch the lemmings over a cliff into a river and filmed this in the same way, making it seem like a mass lemming suicide was taking place. They also filmed them crossing a little stream. They had the lemmings on a snow covered lazy-Susan style turntable and just filmed them as they ran. The film makers used close up shots to make it seem like there were thousands of lemmings migrating. In the wildlife documentary White Wilderness, a few dozen lemmings were imported to Alberta, Canada so that they could be filmed in their “natural” habitat. So when did this myth get started? Well, nobody knows exactly, but it was a 1958 documentary by Disney, which won an Academy Award, by the way, that appears to have popularized the myth.
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