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."

Comments

Suicide theory is a fraud!

[Chmarr]

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.

Re:Suicide theory is a fraud!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Here's a Snopes link for those who believe that everything that isn't on that site to be true:

http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.htm

Re:Suicide theory is a fraud!

[vidarh]

You're partly wrong. The lemming suicides were NOT cooked up by Disney - the idea of lemmings mass suicides preceeded their documentary by half a century at least. Disney faked their documentary because they believed the mass suicide story but they didn't manage to get any film of it, and instead of questioning whether the suicides actually happened they faked a scene to illustrate what they thought was supposed to happen.

RTFA?

[Persecuted_Telemarke]

Ok, fine, I guess most people can't get to the original Science article. I had to do some funky proxy shit with my university's library server. So it should be somewhat forgiven.

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.