The truth didn't come out until the 1980s when a Canadian broadcasting producer investigated, but by then, the damage to the lemmings' reputations had already been done. No one realized this at the time, and the film won an Academy Award for best documentary that year. When the big finale came, they just tossed the poor guys off a cliff, faking mass suicide. All that cliff-flinging footage was totally staged the production company flew in a box of lemmings from Hudson Bay to Calgary - a place devoid of the tundra rodents - then set careful editing and tight camera angles to film a few dozen lemmings running on a snow-covered turntable. In 1958, a Disney documentary film called White Wilderness brought graphic images of hordes of hopeless lemmings, seized by a suicidal compulsion, flinging themselves off cliffs to their deaths as a dramatic voice-over told us of their unreasoning hysteria. This is nefarious slander put out into the world by none other than Disney. That's right, everything you've ever heard about lemmings - until today, with the list that we so far gave you - is a lie. It brings us to our last and most important fact: lemmings are not suicidal morons. Or they might accidentally fall in from so much fuzzy jostling and drown.īut accidentally is the key here. And if they hit water, they might jump in and swim to the other shore in search of the elusive, all-you-can-eat, grass buffet. Lot of animals will reach this point - heck, including lots of nomadic human tribes - but there are so many of these rodents it's pretty darn noticeable when they start to disperse in massive migratory-like mobs, running over whatever they cross. It's also a whole lot of hungry little fatties already on a hardscrabble landscape so it makes sense that once they've chomped their way through their local food supply they have to leave. That is a veritable smorgasbord of bite-sized treats for every predator in the area, and lemming populations get slammed hard and cycle down again. Under ideal conditions a population of lemmings can blow up by a factor of ten in just one year. The little guys are prolific breeders, the fastest breeding vertebrates, in fact. This is likely due to a number of factors including increased predation, food availability, quick gestation and climate. Lemming populations boom hard and bust fast to the point of near-extinction every three to five years. But sometimes they do seem to disappear and reappear like furry fairies because, fact number two, lemming populations flirt with extinction every few years. They continue to thrive just like the rest of us through sex and babies. Fossils of lemmings have been found in northern Europe dating back more than two million years, and clearly, they've been there long enough to adapt to the arctic climate. As mammals that live at the northern most latitudes of the Earth but never hibernate, the lemmings' existence in the tundras is so unlikely that for hundreds of years, "scientists" - if you can call them that - assumed that the little guys were blown there by seasonal storms and dropped from the sky. Number one, lemmings do not fall from the sky. Let's start with a fact that shouldn't need to be stated but because the little creatures are so misunderstood, it does. But we're here, right now, to set the record straight with three actual facts about lemmings. They live in harsh environments, are super cute, kinda mean, and totally misunderstood. Lemmings! They are small, thickset, vole-like animals that live in the Arctic tundra.
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