WHEN FOOD SUPPLIES FAIL

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 29, 27 April 1927, Page 14

WHEN FOOD SUPPLIES FAIL

THE MARCH OF THE LEMMINGS Once in a hundred years the lemmings come Westward in search of food, over the snow; Westward until the salt sea drowns them dumb; Westward till they are drowned, those lemmings go. —Masefield. Lemmings are gnawing animals common to the lands from which the Vikings came the Scandinavian countries —and they occur also in North America and Northern Asia. The European species are small, only about five inches long, including the stubby tail. They make their home amid the mountain uplands, and, like the Vikings, they periodically overflow their home and go forth to conquer new wbrlds. All Nature books from the earliest dote tell of these great marchings. So long as conditions are normally severe lemmings do not increase in number beyond the food capacity of their territory, but occasionally the population grows too great to be provided with food. The animals must, therefore, either starve where they lire, or, like their ancestors and the Vikings, sally out to claim a new kingdom. A few remain; the rest, in uncountable multitudes, get together by instinctive co-operation which we cannot explain—and march. They march from the mountains to the plains, steadily, in a straight line. They eat all before them. They eat the herbage of plains and fields and gardens, of farm and orchard. They eat their way through stacks of hay and corn. They stream through towns and villages. They swim over rivers and lakes. They climb hills and mountains. They go anywhere, urged remorselessly on by instinct, dropping dead in thousands from starvation and disease. Tormented, tortured, suffering, but driven, on by their mad impulse, the swarms of lemmings press on until, at the end of a year, or two years, or three years, they reach the sea and plunge to death. They do not set out' to seek such an end: life is their desire, death is their goal. In this strange fashion, the population is kept within bounds and their territories prevented from becoming over-run.