I’ve recently joined Lemmy and was reminded of this old fact I used to hear about all the time that lemmings will commit mass suicide by jumping off cliffs when they migrate (lemmings being the namesake of Lemmy, I think?).

Do lemmings actually do this? Because I think it would be funny if a social media software was named after an animal that’s literally known for mass hysteria / mob mentality.

  • @Zirconium
    10•1 year ago

    Genocidal Organ Project Itoh. Don’t know how accurate it is

    “Yeah, apparently the lemming myth originates from a Disney documentary of all places. Crazy shit, huh? There’s this film that shows all these lemmings leaping off a cliff into a river, where they all drown. But apparently it was all staged. The lemmings had to be flown in from Canada and launched off the cliff using a turntable. The producers of the film even had to pay for the lemmings—they bought them from some Inuits, apparently.”

    I had to admit this wasn’t quite what I was expecting by way of a response to my confession about John Paul. But when I thought about it, it was the sort of response I should have expected from Williams.

    “So all that stuff about lemmings committing mass suicide as an evolutionary mechanism to regulate their numbers to keep their overall population at a sustainable level—”

    “Yeah, bullshit, all of it,” Williams said. “Apparently, that’s not how evolution really works. It ain’t all about survival of the species at all costs. It’s the individual that likes to live on, and so it adapts to its environment, and the characteristics that help it adapt become the dominant traits that are passed down to the next generation of the species. Evolution is about what the species can do

    • livus
      1•1 year ago

      Yes that’s an accurate account according to everything I’ve read on this.