IHT: The fate of lemmings: It's murder, not suicide: "NEW YORK For centuries, people have puzzled over lemmings, the northern rodents whose populations surge and crash so quickly and so regularly that they inspired an enduring myth: that lemmings commit mass suicide when their numbers grow too large, eagerly pitching themselves off cliffs to their deaths in a foamy sea.
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Scientists debunked that notion decades ago. But they have never been certain what causes the rapid boom-and-bust cycles that gave rise to it. Now, in a study of collared lemmings in Greenland, published on Friday in the journal Science, a team of European researchers report that the real reason has nothing to do with self-annihilation and everything to do with hungry predators. After 15 years of research, the scientists report, they discovered that the combined actions of four predator species - snowy owls, seabirds called long-tailed skuas, arctic foxes and weasel-like stoats - create the four-year cycles in which lemming populations explode and then nearly disappear."
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Scientists debunked that notion decades ago. But they have never been certain what causes the rapid boom-and-bust cycles that gave rise to it. Now, in a study of collared lemmings in Greenland, published on Friday in the journal Science, a team of European researchers report that the real reason has nothing to do with self-annihilation and everything to do with hungry predators. After 15 years of research, the scientists report, they discovered that the combined actions of four predator species - snowy owls, seabirds called long-tailed skuas, arctic foxes and weasel-like stoats - create the four-year cycles in which lemming populations explode and then nearly disappear."
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