The suicide of wood lemmings. The Myth.

Throughout history, many events have amazed mankind: huge disasters, amazing effects, unexpected species, unnusual behaviours and many things else. However, human beings provoke many of these events. We can build fantastic buildings and we can also destroy our rain forests to get economical benefits and many more. From the beginning, we love inventing stories and myths about our surrounding areas and cultures, many times because of we are afraid of things we don't know or because we don't trust other people and cultures. If we can't explain the process we are watching at, we'll invent something to explain it. It is very important to improve our knowledge because without it we are completely lost. Nowadays, we mustn't let people do whatever they want. There are forbidden things, such as throwing defenseless animals off a cliff.

Family: Cricetidae

Specie: Myopus schisticolor Lilljeborg (1844)

This rodent lives in the northern hemisphere high latitudes. There is a myth flying over them: their method to control population size. They were supposed to migrate to commit suicide later. Those animals have a thick fur and a compressed body. They dig their burrows to protect themselves against arctic prairies cold weather in North America and areas from Eurasia, such as Russia or Scandinavia. They eat grasses, roots or fruits which are hardly found in frozen taiga and tundra. In the 50s, Disney filmed a documentary called "White Wilderness" which was awarded with an Oscar in 1959. They won the statue because of their great job filming the migration of wood lemmings and their later suicide by jumping off a cliff. They called that behavior as an "honorable act of fellowship" to control population size.

Despite the film, scientists around the world didn't trust on it, so they tried to demostrate that fact. It was an unusual method of control unseen before. Normally, predators or food shortages control animal population size. After all, the lie was discovered. The false sequence of suicide was filmed by James R. Simon in Alberta (Canada), in an area where we can't find these animals. It is supposed that wood lemmings were bought in farms and pushed to jump off the cliff. This animal abuse case was reported by The Fifth Estate magazine of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1982