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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!
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because I keep clicking the bomb icon and blowing them up?
Why study Lemmings when you can study Pingus?
The path I walk alone is endlessly long.
30 minutes by bike, 15 by bus.
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*
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"
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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*
... 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?
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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.
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and this ..
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Sunny
Be my Friend
real cliff hanger......
Help fight continental drift.
Oh no..
*sounds of lemmings exploding*
-- duh
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..
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.
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 ?
If the Lemmings were running Linux
Then they'd be Pingus
Will I retire or break 10K?
Our own cultural view of suicide is the anomoly and derives, essentially, from Jewish tradition and thus Christian. Even if one does not subscribe to any religion and does not believe in God the social culture that you grew up in, and thus absorbed, is at its heart based on Judeo-Christian ethics and morality.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not kill.
Etc.
If you believe you belong to God than harming yourself, God's property, is a sin. I have a friend who cannot be buried in his family plot because he has tatoos. This is selfmutilation and a sin against God. Imagine if you are outcast by a tatoo what suicide must mean.
Most cultures do not have such an underlying belief structure and actually "glorify" suicide, or at least hold it as a valid personal choice.
Chingachgook's selfinflicted death in fire has deep social significance that is difficult to understand unless one abandon's one's own cultural biases and adopts the point of view of the North Eastern Native American.
Suicide is perfectly understandable, especially that done in the name of cultural selfdefense.
What do you suppose Thermopylae was?
Do we not have our own fallen war heros for "God, Honor and Country"?
KFG
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.
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)
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
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!"
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
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
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Is this offtopic?
a su re_fossil/Treasures/Dodo/dodo.html
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/expeditions/tre
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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.
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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!
But killing of innocents isn't perfectly understandable.
What? Now the game doenst make sense! I'll never play it again!
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especially those suicide bomber ones!
...pop!
(double clicks the mushroom cloud)
OH NO!
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.
Your response seems to assume that there is no such thing as objective truth, at least with regard to human behavior. To expand your argument a little bit ad nauseum, Hitler earnestly believed that the Jews were inferior and were the cause of Germany's, and thus, the master race's problems. How is our sense of morality so superior that it overrides his judgement? Obviously, there must be something in our morality that does override the judgement of Adolf Hitler. Furthermore, I would argue that this is more than simply a battle between different, competing, cultural memes that will utlimately play itself out in Darwinian fashion. Islamic Fundamentalism (indeed, all fundamentalism) is evil, and ultimately, detrimental to our survival, yet fundamentalism still continues to be attractive to members of our species. It should, by all means, simply die out, as you suggest at the end of your post; however, it seems to persist and, perhaps, even to grow overtime. Looking at the situation logically, one can see that overall western liberal democracy is the superior cultural system (in terms of how it benefits humanity), but it will not necessarily be the one that survives this current conflict.
my pet machine
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
Your response seems to assume that there is no such thing as objective truth, at least with regard to human behavior.
I would take that as an axiom. :)
How is our sense of morality so superior that it overrides his judgement? Obviously, there must be something in our morality that does override the judgement of Adolf Hitler.
I don't think there's anything that says it's right for our sense of morality to override his, and the fundamentalists you discuss later in your post. I do think that you are mostly correct, with the exception that there isn't anything inherently right about us opposing them. We have to, it's in our morality system to oppose oppression and those who would bring about suffering. When that oppression grows to a point where it directly or indirectly endangers our own culture, then we must oppose it with any means necessary. It's part of our own morality system. It is also part of theirs, they just define the basic words differently. :) From the point of view of the Islamic fundamentalists, the US is an oppressive empire. From our own point of view, it's a bit different.
You'll find, Luke, that many of the truths we cling to depend entirely on your point of view.
Looking at the situation logically, one can see that overall western liberal democracy is the superior cultural system (in terms of how it benefits humanity), but it will not necessarily be the one that survives this current conflict.
Indeed, Western liberal democracy has brought about a lot of good, positive changes to the world. Longer lifespans as a result of happier lives, better medical research, etc. We can list all the benefits we want, but it's been proven time and again throughout history that when you let the people of a nation make the rules, the nation prospers. The problem is that it's very easy, when there's problems (such as the current fear of terrorism, the war on drugs, etc) to point at the free way of life as the culprit. If there were more police, we'd have less drugs. Right? But if there were more police, we'd also have less freedom. I think that what is needed now is a group of people, super-cops, that adhere to their own system of morality and wisdom, and justice. Jedi. Yeah, that's what we need. :) Seriously!
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First of all, by your logic you can't fault me for hating such bombers, because I believe them to be guilty. So if that's really your stance, you can just stop now.
But let us continue. For one, regardless of whether you believe the victims to be innocent or guilty, I think you might agree that summary execution is not in order. What's more, the Right Decision is NOT only based on individual world view. If that were so, then if I think you deserve to be murdered because I disagree with you, that would be A-OK. One general measure of civilization is that it values human life to at least some degree. If you at all value human life, then you would see that regardless of justification, such suicide bombing is wrong.
First of all, by your logic you can't fault me for hating such bombers, because I believe them to be guilty. So if that's really your stance, you can just stop now.
NOt at all. I agree with you that what they're doing is wrong. :)
But let us continue. For one, regardless of whether you believe the victims to be innocent or guilty, I think you might agree that summary execution is not in order. What's more, the Right Decision is NOT only based on individual world view. If that were so, then if I think you deserve to be murdered because I disagree with you, that would be A-OK. One general measure of civilization is that it values human life to at least some degree. If you at all value human life, then you would see that regardless of justification, such suicide bombing is wrong.
My only point is that from their point of view, the bombers are doing what is right. I don't consider summary execution to be acceptable, and philosophically oppose the death penalty. However, I also think that murderers and the like are frequently not capable of living in society as we have it today, and that they should be removed from society. I'm open to alternatives that don't involve execution.
As far as the suicide bombers themselves go, as I said, from their point of view what they're doing is right. I don't fault them for that. Quite the opposite, I think that someone giving their life doing what they think is right is a gift that should be respected, even if you don't agree with them. I also think that as far as the actual issue goes, the issue of Israeli and American Imperialism in the area, the bombers are on the right side of the issue and we are, in fact, on the wrong side. Finally, I think that their methods are totally uncalled for. Islam is a peaceful religion. Judaism, however, is not. Christianity is supposed to be. But Islam, as it is practiced widespread anyway, is a peaceful religion. From where I'm standing, suicide bombing for religious reasons from Moslems is hypocrisy. I think that the means with which these particular people are acting on their, uh, for lack of a better word, righteousness is totally wrong, but that it doesn't invalidate their point of view. Condemn the action, not the child. :)
The issue, as far as the US is concerned, is even more complicated, however. We can't pull our support of Israel in a fashion that even remotely indicates that the terrorists "won". We can't do anything that would make anyone think that they will get their way by throwing such tantrums, or else they'll just keep deciding they want shit from us and keep up the terrorism. Quite the contrary, we have to respond in a fashion that will motivate them to think more seriously before engaging in a terrorist attack against us. The Israelis are in a similar position. They can't just pack up and leave in response to the terrorist attacks. They can leave for any other reason but that. If they leave for that reason, then Jews the world over will likely become a target of hate once again, since they'll be viewed as pushovers. While both Israel and the US have a sordid history in that region of the world, and neither one of us has been exactly nice to that part of the world, we're in this hole now and it's not easy to get out of it without laying down a foundation for further actions against us. It's a complicated reason. As much as I'd like for our country to just quit screwing around over there like we have been, it's not nearly so cut and dried as all that.
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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.