Lemmings Over the Cliff: Fake Animal Behaviors

[MrRING]

I'm sure we've all heard about how the lemming behavor of jumping to their death from a cliff was an invetion in a Disney live action film... have there been any other major animal behavors that were thought to be real due to being faked on film? Or maybe by report?

 

[lopaka]

I'm not sure if this is the kind of thing you're getting at, but for thousands of years there has been a widespread (if fantastic) belief that nightjars (whippoorwills, eg) suck milk from the teats of goats and cows, eventually causing death.

The family, Caprimulgidae is Latin for goatsucker.

the original chupacabra, accept no substitutes

 

[MrRING]

Well, that's interesting, of course, but i was thinking of other situations where faked footage for a nature documentary (or faked scientific enquiry) leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of an animal or it's behavior like lemmings and cliffs.

 

[Anome]

Well, there was most of Walking With Dinosaurs.

I can't remember any details of anything like that at the moment, but I seem to recall such fabrication was common in nature films at that time. Disney was just one company doing it.

On a vaguely related topic, I was told about a Disney nature film in which a squirrel or mouse or something has a series of adventures and close escapes, after most of which the markings changed, which led certain cynical types to believe that they'd filmed the poor little animals, and just edited out the bits where each one got eaten.

 

[rynner2]

From the Darwin Awards:

It is common "knowledge" that lemmings will commit mass suicide, by running into the ocean or launching themselves from a cliff, when their population exceeds the maximum sustainable limit.

Suicidal lemmings are sometimes cited as an argument against evolution If a herd of lemmings leaps from a cliff, there must certainly be a few in the crowd who are reluctant to follow the leader. What kind of lemmings will predominate in the next generation? Nonjumping lemmings, of course! After a few such incidents, only nonjumping lemmings would remain. So evolution is clearly not working on the lemming population.

How could evolution go so badly awry?

The answer is that lemmings do not commit mass suicide when their population grows too large. They migrate, and during the mass migration, a few animals are pushed from a cliff, or mistake open ocean for a stream. The legend of the suicidal lemming proliferated after the 1958 Disney nature documentary White Wilderness showed staged shots of lemmings jumping from a cliff.