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In a 2010 board game by GMT games, “Leaping Lemmings”, players must maneuver lemmings across a board while avoiding hazards, and successfully launch them off a cliff.īecause of their association with this odd behavior, lemming “suicide” is a frequently used metaphor in reference to people who go along unquestioningly with popular opinion, with potentially dangerous or fatal consequences. This same act was also used in the Apple Computer 1985 Super Bowl commercial “Lemmings” and the popular 1991 video game Lemmings, in which the player must stop the lemmings from mindlessly marching over cliffs or into traps. This comic, which was inspired by a 1953 American Mercury article, showed massive numbers of lemmings jumping over Norwegian cliffs.1011 Even more influential was the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness, which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, in which staged footage was shown with lemmings jumping into certain death after faked scenes of mass migration.12 A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary, Cruel Camera, found the lemmings used for White Wilderness were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where they did not jump off the cliff, but were in fact launched off the cliff using a turntable.13 In 1955, Disney Studio illustrator Carl Barks drew an Uncle Scrooge adventure comic with the title “The Lemming with the Locket”. It was well enough known to be mentioned in The Marching Morons, a 1951 short story by Cyril M. The misconception of lemming “mass suicide” is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors. This fact, combined with the unexplained fluctuations in the population of Norwegian lemmings, gave rise to the misconception.9 In such cases, many may drown if the body of water is so wide as to stretch their physical capability to the limit. Lemmings can swim and may choose to cross a body of water in search of a new habitat.

Driven by strong biological urges, some species of lemmings may migrate in large groups when population density becomes too great. It is not a mass suicide, but the result of their migratory behavior. Lemmings became the subject of a popular misconception that they commit mass suicide when they migrate.

When large numbers of lemmings migrate, some of them will inevitably drown while crossing rivers and lakes, like this one in Norway. Worm first published dissections of a lemming, which showed they are anatomically similar to most other rodents, and the work of Carl Linnaeus proved they had a natural origin.78 In the 1530s, the geographer Zeigler of Strasbourg proposed the theory that the creatures fell out of the sky during stormy weather (also featured in the folklore of the Inupiat/Yupik at Norton Sound), and then died suddenly when the grass grew in spring.6 This description was contradicted by the natural historian Ole Worm, who accepted that lemmings could fall out of the sky, but claimed they had been brought over by the wind rather than created by spontaneous generation. Misconceptions about lemmings go back many centuries. Lemmings jumping off cliffs is an urban legend.