[7] Fluctuations in the lemming population affect the behaviour of predators, and may fuel irruptions of birds of prey such as snowy owls to areas further south.

In 1532, the geographer Jacob Ziegler of Bavaria proposed the theory that the creatures fell out of the sky during stormy weather[9][10] and then died suddenly when the grass grew in spring.

[11] This description was contradicted by natural historian Ole Worm, who accepted that lemmings could fall out of the sky, but claimed that they had been brought over by the wind rather than created by spontaneous generation.

Worm published dissections of a lemming, which showed that they are anatomically similar to most other rodents such as voles and hamsters, and the work of Carl Linnaeus proved that they had a natural origin.

Lemmings have become the subject of a widely popular misconception that they are driven to commit mass suicide when they migrate by jumping off cliffs or drowning in bodies of water.

In the August 1877 issue of Popular Science Monthly, apparently suicidal lemmings are presumed to be swimming in the Atlantic Ocean in search of the submerged continent of Lemuria.

[15][16] Lemmings also appear in Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 short story "The Possessed", where their suicidal urges are attributed to the lingering consciousness of an alien group mind, which had inhabited the species in the prehistoric past.

[19][20] Because of the limited number of lemmings at their disposal, which in any case were the wrong subspecies, the migration scenes were simulated using tight camera angles and a large, snow-covered turntable.

The song "Lemmings (Including 'Cog')" from the 1971 album Pawn Hearts by progressive rock band Van der Graaf Generator is about a person who sees their loved ones "crashing on quite blindly to the sea".

In 1991, a puzzle-platform video game called Lemmings was released, in which the player must save a certain percentage of the titular small humanoid creatures as they march heedlessly through a dangerous environment.

[22] In Russian Terra Nova (2008 film) lemmings ate food stocks of the group of prisoners at Novaya Zemlya island, that caused the cannibalism among the population of colony.