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Lemming Population Flux Solved: Mass Suicide Not to Blame
quogmire writes "Australia's ABC reports that biologists from the Universities of Finland and Freiburg (Germany) have finally solved the question of lemming population fluctuations once thought to be caused by lemmings mass-suiciding by plunging off cliffs. 'Lemming populations, they say, surge spectacularly and fall just as quickly, thanks to the combined feasting of four predators: the stoat, arctic fox, snowy owl and a seabird called the long-tailed skua.' The original article (Login required) is published in Science."
There will always be another sequel.
well, at least now I know that its just not God pushing the mushroom cloud button!
Game Overdrive - Gaming News
because I keep clicking the bomb icon and blowing them up?
When I read the slashdot bit, but before I read the article itself, I thought the article was reffering to the computer Lemmings in the video game. Anyone else think that?
Why study Lemmings when you can study Pingus?
The path I walk alone is endlessly long.
30 minutes by bike, 15 by bus.
Thanks scientists, for destroying the magic behind my favourite game.
I thought it was because I should have had one build that bridge across the chasm. I didn't consider that the game had predators as well.
What? There are STILL people that believe that lemmings mass suicide?! Geez, what a hoax.
It's well known, by me at least, that the whole 'lemming suicide' thing was something that Disney cooked up during their 'bad documentary' era. In this case the lemmings were hearded off a cliff by the documentary crew, and was filmed as a 'mass suicide'.
I've seen some pretty amusing/sad documentaries that came out of Disney, including one that had the antics of a Jaguar eating various creatrues. It was OBVIOUS that it was a jaguar in a rather well done habitat where they threw in various animals, mostly eels, for the jaguar to attack. It was exceptionally amusing, but sad, too, that they thought to do something like this and pass it off as truth.
those Disney lemmings didn't commit suicide, they were MURDERED! *gasp*
I mean, dumping lemmings of a cliff from a truck just for shooting a nature document.
So is the old Psygnosis game now obsolete and environmentally incorrect?
The snopes.com link is really shocking. I notice it dates to '96... I'm surprised I hadn't heard about it until now.
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They're not suicidal, they're just tasty!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Lemmings jump because of Disney
I guess I can sleep now that I know the mystery behind lemming population flucuations.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
This doesn't concur with the results I got from my private investigations regarding the behaviour of lemmings. I did some massive computer simulations during the 90's, which showed that lemmings are stupid animals which will walk into one direction until they fall off the cliff. Only few of them can use jack-hammers or parachutes, and even that not without explicit order.
'Lemmings were induced into jumping off a cliff for this Disney nature film'
...surely there's SOMETHING else more worthy of study.
Losers choose to abuse the use of "loose".
*puts hands on head* Oh-no!!!
*POP*
I mean really, who gives a rat's arse about the Lemmings population flux??!
If the Lemmings were running Linux or if the researchers found the solution playing the Lemmings videograme then maybe I'd be midly interested...
... and provides a few inaccuracies of its own, if the new article is to be believed.
http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.htm
Chaos theory was in part defined following studies of populations of just TWO animals, the arctic hare and the the Canadian lynx. This was around 1989.
So why should it be surprising that populations of lemmings are chaotic?
What, exactly, is the news here?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I suspect that the human population will go through a similar cycle. Exponential growth, exceed the carrying capacity and then population crash. We're seeing it at the local scale but with globalisation, I don't see anything to stop it on a global scale.
At the moment, the western industrialised nations are fairly steady state but the developing and 3rd world nations are definitely not. We can look forward to wars over resources in the relatively near future (have they started already, iraq just the prequel?).
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The idea that Lemmings commit suicide was introduced by Disney
:-(
Actually, it was perpetuated and made into a mass-market notion by Disney, but they didn't think that up by themselves. They just made it worse.
I guess the credits didn't include the claim "no animals were harmed during the making of this movie"...
"Dozens of animals were hurled off a cliff during the making of this documentory." more likelly...
But that disclaimer allways makes me wonder if the filmakers forcibly made the entire earth vegans for the duration of filming, AND prevented all accidental deaths such as roadkill...
A better phrasing would be "No animals were hurt by the process of making this film" or something.
You can't take the sky from me...
I guess whoever did this study failed their first ecology course in college.
Almost every ecology teacher beats several key things into your heads.
1. Survival of the fittest
in other words an individual does not do something for the benifit of the species, mainly due to the fact that doing so diverts energy that could be used to producing more young so that their genes survive. The individual will do things to benifit their genes, but not for unrelated individuals of the same species. Social species do have some altruistic behaviours, but their communities are generally made up of individuals that are related. However these altruistic behaviors do not include suicide.
2. The lynx and Hare.
Classic example of what is going on with the lemmings here. As the hare population increases there is more food for the lynx, thus more offspring are produced. As the lynx population increases there are fewer hare to eat and the lynx population declines, and so on.
So this study on lemmings is not surprising, actually I'm quite shocked that someone didn't figure it out sooner.
crowbar??
For American readers, that's a Long-tailed Jaeger.
Apparently it has also been found that when the lemmings do jump off the cliff, they all have little umbrellas to make it down safely.
But I just wanted to point out that the ABC article is somewhat misleading. The original research article at no point addresses or attempts to refute the mass-suicide myth. Because, honestly, no scientist believed that was possible. The question they considered was much more reasonable: do the large deviations come from predators eating lemmings, or from a lack of vegatation for the lemmings to eat? It seems as though they have resolved that the crashes in population come from predator over-population, not from food scarcity.
This article will probably not shake the foundations of population dynamics. As some other posters have pointed out, it is not so surprising that one sees immense highs and massive crashes in a predator-prey system, because these phenomena exist even in simple mathematical models of pred-prey systems. So for a mathematician this should fly right under the radar.
On the other hand, to a population dynamics guy, this is somewhat interesting, as in that field it is typically considered hard to model these dynamics accurately. It seems as though these guys have determined some parameters in the population dynamics model experimentally, and this is what it is interesting.
Persecuted Telemarketers Unite!
Why is the moderated as informative?? more like redundant.. the damn snopes.com link is IN THE FUCKING SLASHDOT ARTICLE
Now that we are discussing suicide, and how we had a whole messed up definition of what the suicider-lemmings were doing, I wonder if we have a similarly messed up understanding of the suiciders ...
... but whatever ... basically the question that pops in my head is whether the operating definition of a suicide-bomber that is currently in vogue is comprehensive or not.
... or at some other level that is atleast higher than that of a boot in the face.
I know that POTUS has defined it in pretty much black and white, and the LUNATIC calls them the deadenders, the military calls them operatives
And the analogy with the lemmings is whether the use of a suicide-bomber as a strategic and assymetric weapon of war is something that may make sense when the analysis is done at the level of survival of not individuals or groups but at the level of cultures
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
and this ..
This page was generated by a Group of Trained Rabbits for RabidStoat (689404) it's been quite a day !
Sunny
Be my Friend
real cliff hanger......
Help fight continental drift.
That's so unpatriotic, I'm gonna call Ashcroft.
+4 for linking a link in the article.
/.
Ahh dont ye just love
Oh no..
*sounds of lemmings exploding*
-- duh
Take 5 lemmings, alive or dead (if alive bite their heads off with your mouth, then clean them)
put olive oil or butter in a skiller
use 1 bell pepper
use 2 onions
sautee on high for 15 minutes or until meat turns
blue
you can also pre season with lea and perrins
makes a great meal!
You better call Saddam Hussein you unpatriotic pinko!
What an insightful thought. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the matter. +5 funny.
You can link a link in the story!
FUCKING HELL, you are cool!
I love you...
I wonder why it took them so long to come up with a model for lemmings' weird population behavior. I think such "boom and bust" cycles have also been observed for caribou and the arctic wolf. A rise in the caribou population causes a corresponding rise for wolves and both fall dramatically afterwards. I'm not completely sure about this, so please feel free to correct me here.
Also, it is interesting that suicidal behavior among animals does exist. This Everything2 node provides some very interesting information about this matter.
Posting messages for the betterment of humanity..
White Aryan Resistance Radio
Apart from the "University of Finland" and all the cutesy Lemmings jokes, does this strike anyone as horrificly unscientific? I mean, it's been observed for ages that the growth of the population of the prey causes a growth in population of the predator. Then your population growth for the lemmings looks something like:
dL/dt = bL/2 - hP
where L is the lemming population, b is the average number of lemmings born in a time interval, P is the number of predators and h is some constant. P on the other hand is related to L by some observed relation:
dP/dt ~ L
Given suitable values for b and h we can predict the behaviour of the lemming population without having to invent catastrophic events to explain the fluctuations of L without any empirical evidence to support them.
Nope..but then I realize there's actually a real world out there.
http://www.you-are-a-huge-nerd.com/public/freepix/ wallpaper2.jpg
This new study needs to be focused on the slashdot lemming and how the groupthink slashbots started and evolved.
Yup. We all just love and hate it. It's truly a love hate relationship for me.
Back in the day, THE thing to study at university was Chemical Engineering, since graduates were in high demand and earned a fortune.
Guess what ? 3 years later, there was a glut and they couldn't find jobs.
Parallels with today's job market anyone ?
Parallels with lemming population ?
I'm truly impressed.
If the Lemmings were running Linux
Then they'd be Pingus
Will I retire or break 10K?
I bet you're the laugh at parties.
I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as the "University of Finland". At least, I've been living in Finland for the past two years and I've never heard of it.
If you read the post once more you may notice that little detail that states:
Universities of Finland. And I'm sure that Finland have several universities.
Man I wish I could find that game for download, hell even for purchase. Hours of entertainment.
Could someone mod the other Lemmings jokes down to -1, so the first one everyone sees is this one?
Ta,
Hmm. Implying that all the universities in Finland participated? That seems pretty unlikely.
In fact Finland does have many universities. A great many when you consider it only has about 5 million people.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
A popular survival strategy for many insects is to synchronize their breeding so that they produce a huge number of offspring within a short period of time. The predators can stuff themselves silly but there are plenty of survivors.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Actually, that was the first thought that came to my mind.
"I thought Lemming blew themselves up in the game... wait, why is the Science journal publishing this crap?... Oh, they're talking about the real Lemmings."
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
Yes, but the details of the altruism seem to be missed in a lot of popular science writing. Evolution is working on behavior here, and the more complicated a behavior is the harder it is to appear and persist. So, if a simple response of helping a neighbor at only a minor cost usually benefits a relative, the fact that nearby non-relatives sometimes get helped isn't violating some evolutionary principle.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
...not to mention all of the EMOTIONAL TRAUMA
Thanks, me to :-)
I might also point out that crime and violence are seperate issues. One is a behaviour and the other is a violation of a code of behaviour.
Boxing is not a crime. Boxing is violent.
Violence can increase as violent crime decreases. There is no logical connection between crime and violence, only a social connection based on local mores.
KFG
In fact Finland does have many universities. A great many when you consider it only has about 5 million people.
Yes, Finland is practically swarming with academics.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Professor Ilkka Hanski is from the Department of Ecology and Systematics of University of Helsinki.
What does a story about lemmings have to do with Linux and OSS?????
We need more topics on why companies should release their products into the public domain, and err, um, nevermind...the subjects are related.
Companies fail because there are more predators feeding on them...not the lemming mantality that leads them to jump off cliffs.
In case you missed the Disney version, Killime was the youngest and the bravest of the lemmings. He was soooo cute! He tried to stop the other lemmings from going over the cliff, but slipped and fell to his death screaming "D'oh!".
"Time for another upgrade/mass-migration!"
Sigh again: the comment on the original post says: unversities of Finland and Freiburg, as in two universities, not as in "all the universities of Finland and that one from Freiburg, Germany". Also in the original abc post it's "university of Finland". It should read: Ilkka Hanski, University of Helsinki, Finland..
Note the references on the Snopes page, which are years earlier.
I first heard about it in a Boston Globe article in 1987. Boston Globe
No, actually I meant Apple users. As bad as Windows users are, Mac users are 100 times worse about immediately running out and buying the latest upgrade. Jobs is god!.
With all their lies. LIES I tell you. I can't stand it anymore!!!!111!
I am always amused when foreigners imagine that in small foreign countries there is just one big kick-ass organization of each kind and then this is called the X of Novistrana... it's almost as if it came straight from South Park. We have a bunch of universities in this country, but none of them are called the University of Finland...
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
You're right.
From Science (My university subscribes):
Olivier Gilg,1,2* Ilkka Hanski,1 Benoit Sittler3
1 Department of Ecology and Systematics, Division of Population Biology, Post Office Box 65, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland.
2 CBGP, Campus de Baillarguet, Equipe Biologie et Gestion des Pullulations (INRA-IRD), CS 30016, 34988 Montferrier/Lez Cedex, France.
3 Institut fur Landespflege, University of Freiburg, 79085 Freiburg, Germany.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Is this offtopic?
a su re_fossil/Treasures/Dodo/dodo.html
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/expeditions/tre
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Ilkka Hanski is from the University of Helsinki, nothing relevant seems to come up for Oliver Gilg, so he might be beginning a grad student there.
Poor countries whose population attempts to grow without bounds will either self-destruct, export their people, or attack their neighbors. Self destruction solves the local problem, although the suffering involved is horrid. Emigration to a richer country will convert their progeny to the no-growth standard. Attacking a stronger country results in defeat of the weaker with consequent loss of life and possible conversion of the poor country to more rational behavior.
In short, world-wide dramatic human population cycles are unlikely.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Universities of Finland. And I'm sure that Finland have several universities.
I'm afraid you misread that. The post says "Universities of Finland and Freiburg (Germany)", while the ABC article says "University of Finland, and Benoit Sittler of the University of Freiburg in Germany."
The university in question is the University of Helsinki, Finland. (I have university access to the Science articles.)
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Olivier Gilg,1,2*
He's a subscriber!
What? Now the game doenst make sense! I'll never play it again!
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
I can sleep at night! This has caused an awful drain on myself and my family, thank God the nightmare is over!
MMORPG Fan? Prove your worth!
especially those suicide bomber ones!
...pop!
(double clicks the mushroom cloud)
OH NO!
Man where are those PETA, Celebs and Green Peace tree huggers when you need 'em? Disney is uhm harming and killing those lemmings!!!
Oh wait, they are not endangers and they are not as cute as them wheals. Never mind... Disney needs to import at least few thousands of those lemmings for some good mass death effect!
Don't weasels kill lemmings too? Don't tell me the game lied to me!
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I do love the department title!
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Does this mean there'll be a new release of that wonderful (DOS? Amiga?) game, Lemmings? I certainly hope so :)
So this time it'll be in Flash (rather than [S/]VGA?)
With all due respect, the problem of predator/prey relationships was solved with differential equations decades ago.
They demonstrated the idea of equilibrium was not the norm and that, even if it was magically set, fluctuations would rapidly develop.
As the predator population grows, it begins to kill off too much of the prey. As the prey population dwindles, the predators start starving. Eventually a significant proportion starve off. Then the prey population, freed, bounds back. The predators then start to grow again, this never-ending double sign wave of population vs. time, one's population following the other.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
The lemmings morphed into Roadies
Lotke-Volterra equations were the equation systems used to describe the population dynamics of elk and wolves on Isle Royal. The poster who said this stuff first surfaced in 1989 is almost 100 years off; as I remember, the original study was done by the Hudson Bay company.A LONG year ago.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.