Science Vs - When Your Eyes See Lies

Episode Date: November 9, 2023

A dead man with a bitten penis and perplexing DNA, a terrifying syndrome where everything around you appears in miniature, and the big lie we all believe about lemmings: Wendy and Joel tell three science stories about times when things were not what they seemed, recorded live at the Beaker Street Festival in Tasmania.  Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsLIVE  Chapters:  (00:00) Welcome to Science Vs LIVE! (02:08) The Case of the Missing Penis (17:55) Alice In Wonderland Syndrome (31:35) The Big Lemming Lie This episode has been produced by Wendy Zukerman, Joel Werner and Austin Mitchell, with help from Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang, and Nicholas DelRose. Our original version of lemmings was helped into the world by Kaitlyn Sawrey, Ben Kuebrich, Heather Rogers, and Shruti Ravindran.  Edited by Blythe Terrell and Annie-Rose Strasser. Fact Checking by Carmen Drahl. Mix and Sound Design by Bobby Lord and Bumi Hidaka. Scoring by Bobby Lord, Peter Leonard, Bumi Hidaka, and Emma Munger. Thanks to all of the researchers we spoke to including… Dr. Malte Andersson, Dr. Anders Angerbjörn, Dr. Rolf Anker Ims, Dr. Charles J. Krebs, and others. As well as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for the use of Cruel Camera. And special thanks to Barbara and Paul Werner, Tegan Taylor, Joseph Lavelle Wilson and the Zukerman family. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So please make sure to cheer very loudly for Wendy Zuckerman and Joel Werner. Hi, Wendy here. So over the past few months, supervising producer Joel Werner and I have been travelling around Australia performing an episode of Science. Live in front of real live people, if you weren't sure what a live show is. So just a few weeks ago, we were at South by Southwest Sydney, which is the first time that the South by Southwest Festival has been held outside of Austin, Texas. And a few months before that, we braved the chilly Tasmanian winter to perform the show at the Beaker Street Festival. And that's what we're going to play for you today. Our show is called When Your Eyes See Lies,

and it is entirely live. So what you're about to hear, all of the voice clips and the music, you know, all the scoring, we cued it live. So it's not entirely perfect. There were more than 100 samples, and we also pointed a couple of mics at the audience too. Also, we might do a little shimmying. You know, if a joke doesn't land, we might make it land. So we might just get you guys laughing now. Joel, do you have maybe a joke to sort of get them laughing a little more?

So I've only ever made up one joke in my life. I'm pretty proud of it. But it's when the laser goes to church, where does it sit? In the pew-pew-pews. Very good. Very good. I'm a dad.

I'm a dad. I'm a dad. I'm a dad. Okay, we have got it. This is great. We're going to have fun. Let's jump in. Science vs. Live at the Bigger Street Festival in Hobart, Tasmania starts now. Quote. An 88-year-old man was found dead at his home with a genital wound and part of his penis missing. You got that? 88 year old man, dead, wound on his willy, part of the penis

missing. This is how a case report that I read years ago began. And since I read that report, I have not been able to get it out of my mind. We've never shared it on the show before. And now I get to share it with you all. And this guy. That's like, I've never seen a paper like that. It sounds like one that would come up in a sensational magazine or something. It's a CSI episode waiting to happen for sure. This is Professor Geoff Craig. He's a geneticist at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, and he is going to walk us through what happened here. What struck you as you were reading it? I thought, first of all, I thought, ouch, as all men would do, but then I thought the word why and how.

Because here's what's weird. Apart from the dead guy with his missing bits, there were no other injuries to his body and no signs of a struggle. So what was going on here? Had the man been killed? Perhaps some kind of sexual play gone wrong? Well, there was one possible clue. The man's pet dog was in the house.

Could the pup be responsible? Was it part cocker spaniel? Geoff, our geneticist, wondered the same thing. Did the dog attack him when he was naked and then he died, or did he die and then the dog just looked for a tasty morsel or something? The officials on the case sure wondered whether the dog had nibbled the dead man's knob. Or, as the case report asked, could the dog have been, quote,

responsible for the partial emasculation? End quote. Now, we know that if you die, your pet dog, a.k.a. best friend, may chow down on your still warm remains. In fact, a review paper on the topic wrote that, quote, animal mutilations can start rapidly after death, generally within a couple of hours, and sometimes even sooner, end quote.

But curiously, according to the paper, which analysed 41 human corpses that had all been nibbled on by their pooches, mostly the dogs weren't going for the willies. In fact, in about three quarters of the cases, they went for the face. So you can think about that next time your fur baby gives you a little lick on the face. Perhaps they're just wetting their appetite.

But bottom line, one of the going theories was that the man had died of natural causes and then the dog bit his willy. But to see if this idea was on the money, the forensic scientists on the scene gave the pooch an emetic, something to make it vomit. And voila, out came a piece of connective tissue about the size of a hazelnut, they wrote. This hazelnut-sized chunk of flesh, it looked a lot like the missing piece of penis.

But to be absolutely sure, they did some genetic detective work. Using a trustworthy genetic test, the team compared the DNA of the nut-sized bit of tissue found in the dog to the dead man. And, like, this was going to be a pretty short day at the office, right? It seemed pretty obvious what had happened here. Either before or after death, this dog bit the end of the guy's todger off. You'd imagine that everyone was expecting a pretty short day, you know? This was going to be a match. Another dog, another day. But that is not what happened. According to the DNA, those tissue samples looked like they came from two different people.

Today on the show, nothing is as it seems. We are bringing you three stories, live from Beaker Street Festival in Tasmania. And these are stories where even when you think you know what's going on, when you think you can see everything, don't be so cocky. Because your eyes can see lies. When it comes to solving mysteries involving dogs and their dongs, there's a lot of opinions. But then there's science.

Murder, monsters and mind-bending tales are coming right up it's season three of the joy of why and i still have a lot of questions like what is this thing we call time why does alt altruism exist? And where is Jan Eleven? I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right. I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jan Eleven.

I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is... Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Welcome back.

We left you with a dead man, part of his penis missing, and a dog with a penis-esque lump of flesh that, according to the DNA evidence, didn't look like it came from the dead man. I talked to geneticist Geoff Craig about how he'd feel if he had gotten the call from the lab saying that the DNA wasn't a perfect match. And so if you were sort of the forensic scientist on this case,

what would you have thought in that moment? In that moment, if I was a forensic scientist, I would have thought, well, that dog must have, the dog must have eaten part of another man. Some foul play, yeah, some kind of weird ritual with two men and then one of them disappeared. Oh, my God, the mind boggles in a number of ways. The mind sure does boggle.

Because, I mean, just to explain this whole mystery again, it really means that one other person, a stranger, perhaps a murderer, came into the house, bit the dead guy's willy, and then the dog chewed off some of that guy's flesh. Or, as Geoff suggested, perhaps it wasn't an intruder. Perhaps there was just some kind of sexual thing going on and maybe it went terribly wrong. You've heard of people from emergency rooms saying

you wouldn't believe the stories I've heard of some of the men that have come in with a bit of penis missing or something. Things stuck in various places. Yeah, I fell on a vacuum cleaner, things like that. But then when the X-ray shows that there's a Barbie doll in there, you know, then, you know, something didn't... You didn't just fall on that in the shower. No, you didn't just fall on that in the shower.

So what was going on here? Whose nut-sized tissue did the dog eat and where was the rest of this man's todger? Before sounding the alarm, the officials on the case took some fresh DNA samples. You see, the first time around, they only swabbed one spot on the guy, as you'd normally do. But this time, they...

Sample cells from lots of different places. They took samples from his skin, blood, muscles, spleen, bone marrow, brain, liver, and then they re-ran all the genetic testing. And what they found is that this guy, he had two sets of DNA. We're only supposed to have one set of DNA. You know, that's the whole basis of genetic testing, right? You have one set on your hands, on your blood, in your willy liver. It shouldn't matter where you test it. Your DNA is your DNA, right?

Well, not in this case. The DNA samples from the knob of his penis and cheek were different to the DNA samples from his blood. The DNA in his left leg muscle had a different profile to the muscle in his right leg. As Jeff says... There was a true mixing of cells from basically two different people. ..all squished into one person. And science has a word to describe this man.

He's a chimera. The word comes from Greek mythology, where the chimera was a fire-breathing monster made of different animals. Three heads, one of a lion, the other of a goat, and then there's a snake somewhere in there. But in this case, it's just a regular guy, someone whose body is made of cells that are genetically different. So how the heck can this happen?

Well, Jeff says that this all would have started when this man was growing inside his mother's womb. Now, under normal circumstances, what's supposed to happen is that a sperm and an egg get together, and that fertilised egg, well, it starts growing, and its cells start dividing. Those develop into little balls of cells, these balls of cells multiplying and producing lots of cells that are exactly the same.

Just early, early cells. And by the way, Jeff told me something super cool about these little balls of cells that turn into humans. Those ball of cells have a structure on the outside, which is like an eggshell and it hatches. When I saw this first, I thought, blow my mind. I didn't know that humans hatch from eggs as well. No, does it really look like that, like a little chicken?

It does actually. I've seen it happen, pictures under a microscope, and yes, there is a kind of crack in the hard kind of shell and out comes this kind of soft body inside, this soft kind of ball of cells. It's really cool. So these soft balls of cells, which have been fertilised for maybe a week,

normally they would attach into a place in the uterus and grow there into one happy baby. But a couple of things must have gone differently for Al Chimera. Perhaps on that fateful night when his mum and dad stooped, instead of one egg getting fertilised, two eggs were fertilised by two different sperm. And that meant you would have two fertilised eggs growing and dividing two balls of cells, two sets of DNA.

So far, so good. Now, often when this kind of thing happens, when these balls of cells hatch and then attach to the uterus, they attach into different places on the uterus, giving room for the two separate fetuses to grow. Here's Jeff. Most of the time, they just grow in peace and happily live side by side.

And ta-da, you get two babies. That's how we get fraternal twins. But with our deceased chimera man, Jeff reckons that the two balls of cells must have implanted into the uterus close, like too close, kind of squished right next to each other. So if they touch each other,

if those two individuals get a bit frisky and... Oh, Jeff, no, no. These two individuals say they end up sleeping back to back. They can swap cells. That's a hypothesis. So they swap a few cells. Catch that? These blobby siblings can swap a few cells. And by the way, for the development nerds out there, we're in the blastocyst stage.

And the thing is, that when the cells swap, they bring their DNA with them, right? Which could explain how someone could get different DNA in different parts of their body. Yeah, even if just one of those cells swaps, then that one cell's descendants could end up almost anywhere. It's even possible that after sharing some cells, one of the blobby siblings died. This is a phenomena sometimes called as the vanishing twin. Or perhaps instead of just swapping a few cells, the blobby siblings completely fused together. Then you have, then you, the two twins become one individual. And one individual with one head, two arms. Yes. You're at the early stage where there's no organs or anything. So it doesn't matter if you

mix cells together. It's like giving it twice as many cells because early embryos are very adaptable and plastic. So it doesn't really matter to them that some cells have swapped. They just make do with what they've got. You know, one or two cells might go to form an intestine. You know, one or two more cells might even go to form a right leg and then a left leg. And so that is how one person can end up with two sets of DNA. And Jeff says that this dead guy might not have even known he was a chimera. In fact, a lot of chimeras go undetected because you need to get a DNA test where you test more than one bit of tissue. And often we don't do that. There have been cases of people discovering their chimeras later on in life, sometimes when they need to get an organ donation.

And curiously, we keep discovering more and more ways that you can kind of be a chimera, even if you didn't share some cells with a twin in the womb. Like one study of almost 60 women who had given birth to sons found that almost two-thirds of them had male DNA in their brain. The authors said that the male DNA probably wiggled its way into their brains when the women were pregnant, suggesting that when you carry a baby, the DNA of your kid might get into your body. And Jeff says that this could go in the other direction too,

that cells from our mothers could move through the placenta and land on us. Which brings us back to the man found in his home with part of his willy missing. While Jeff's like, this was one rather peculiar case report, he sees something bigger here. It's amazing. It is an amazing story. And I think it does tell me not that particular situation with the dog, but there may be more chimeras going around the world unnoticed. So it could be much more common than we think. This could happen quite a lot. We could be chimeras? We could be. Yes, yeah, we could be. And when I was a child, I used to have this recurrent dream that there was another

one of me lying beside me. Really? It is, you know, still now plausible that I started life as a twin and my co-twin disappeared early on. And I've mentioned this to a journalist before and it ended up as the headline, the first line of the story. Don't worry, the first line of this story is going to be like, man found without his penis. Yeah, it's kind of obvious, yeah. So we've ultimately cracked the case of the curious incident

of the dog and the dead guy with the dismembered dong. Try and say that fast three times. The most likely scenario here was that this man, who was a chimera, died of natural causes and then the dog ate his willy. Next up, we're going to keep falling down the rabbit hole A supervising producer tells us a tale about when you really can't believe your own eyes This story starts in Sydney, Australia in the early 1980s

and it's a story about a little boy who was two years old at the time. He was a lovely two-year-old, articulate, very interested, very involved in everything, a little bit weird, you know, but very interesting child. This is the boy's mum, Barbara. She remembers the little boy as having shaggy blonde hair, running around the house, wielding a lightsaber like Luke Skywalker. He was her only child. He just enjoyed life, you know, never sitting still, didn't want to watch TV, wanted to go and explore, wanted to look, wanted to play games, you know, and it was a healthy little boy and that's,

you know, he was very healthy. But then something happened to that otherwise healthy little boy, something that no one could explain. It was the start of a mystery that would follow the family for years to come. And it all began one day when Barbara, her mum and the little boy were out doing the weekly grocery shop. And it was winter, I remember, because he had a little overcoat on and he was walking along. Mum and I were talking and he was in the middle of us. After the shop, the three of them would always go and get something to eat.

As we were walking to have some lunch, my son was in between us and he held his hand up and he said, my hand's small. Now at first, Barbara didn't think twice about this. Kids say weird stuff all the time, right? You know, I said, yeah, I put mine beside him and said, yes, it's much little, it's little. And he said, no, no, no, really little. And then I looked at my mum and then she took over and she said, what do you mean really little? He said, like really little, like a doll's hand. As far as they could tell, the boy was seeing his hand as if it was completely shrunk in size, miniaturised. Neither Barbara or her mum had ever

encountered anything like this before. Then we looked at each other and I panicked straight away and I looked up into my mother's eyes and she's giving me a calming look but even I could see in her face this isn't right and he was worried. That was the part that scared me the most he was worried by now barbara is freaking out and her mind races to worst case scenarios what could be causing this a brain tumor some kind of psychotic episode it's a little boy hallucinating if anything was wrong at any stage with my son i I was totally off the planet. I couldn't cope. And you imagine, if they fall over and scrape his knee, I'll panic.

But if he's standing there with his hand there telling me it's the size of a doll, I'm absolutely out of my mind. I was really, really worried. I thought there was something really badly going on with him. So the next day, Barbara takes her son to see the family optometrist. And it's the 1980s, right? So you can totally get a next day appointment. And he was thoroughly checked, all behind the eyes, everything was checked. The optometrist said his eyes are perfect. And yet these episodes keep happening again and again.

Every few weeks or so, Barbara's son's whole world starts shrinking. And it would not only be the hand, it would be the feet. He would look at his feet and he would say, my feet are little, it's happening again, it's happening again, it's happening again. And he wouldn't say anything else, just it's happening again and we'd know. Now, what's really weird is it turns out that this isn't just happening to Barbara's son. Kids all over the world have been experiencing really similar bizarre symptoms. And so I wanted to find out what on earth was going on with all of these kids.

So let's leave Barbara quietly freaking out in the 1980s, and we'll catch up with a doctor who's ended up obsessing about this almost as much as me. All right, very good. I'm Osman Farooq. I'm a pediatric neurologist, and I'm here at the University of Buffalo in Buffalo, New York. For Osman, this started one day when he was sitting in his office clearing out his inbox and he came across an email from one of his mentors. His mentor had sent Usman a book chapter that he'd been working on

and asked the young neurologist to give his opinion. And I thought, oh, come on, you know, he gave me a, sent me a book chapter. How am I supposed to go through that? I don't have time to even finish the things I need to do. But I have a huge amount of respect and admiration for him. So I thought, okay, let me just open it and I'll read the first paragraph and I'll send him a comment saying, you know, great job. You know, great job.

Politely blowing him off. We've all been there. But that didn't happen. So Usman pulled out the chapter and he started to read. And I ended up reading the entire book chapter in one sitting, which I've never done before. I was just awestruck at this topic. And the topic that made Usman so awestruck, it's a little known, somewhat bizarre syndrome with a very curious name. The syndrome is called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. This chapter, which had consumed Osman, describes a bizarre condition which was first identified in the 1950s where people, often kids kids see things either bigger than they are which is called macropsia or smaller called micropsia this is what the little boy in sydney had and the name obviously comes from the lewis carroll books where alice grows and shrinks as she eats and drinks on her adventures in the psychedelic wonderland so it's really interesting because people experience that exact thing,

where they feel like they're growing in size or shrinking in size. And it's not just growing and shrinking. Kids with Alice in Wonderland syndrome experience a whole bunch of bizarre symptoms. So things like seeing wrinkled surfaces as if they're smooth, which is sometimes called aragopsia. In some cases, they experience chloropsia, which is described as green vision. Some kids sense everything as moving in slow motion.

So as Usman's sitting in his office reading the book chapter, he suddenly realizes. Oh my goodness, these symptoms are what I had experienced as a kid and it didn't hit me right away. As I got about, you know, one or two pages into the chapter, I thought, oh my goodness, I finally, I understand what had happened to me as a kid. I would experience my hands and my fingers kind of swelling up like sausages. I would feel like my arms are growing in length. And when I would move my hands and fingers, it would seem like they're moving in slow motion. When I first started to experience these, it was quite terrifying.

Usman is so weirded out that he had this syndrome too. He finishes reading the chapter and walks into his colleague's office. And I think I had this look on my face, kind of like, you know, in the movie, The Ten Commandments, when Moses gets the revelation, you know, he looks like a changed person. And my nurse looks at me. She's like, what's going on with you? And as I'm explaining to her, she says, this happened to me when I was a kid. Usman starts researching everything he can about Alice in Wonderland syndrome. And he finds out that one of the most common reasons that kids get this,

kids like Barbara's little boy, is when they get an illness that, and often an illness that is associated with a fever. So things like influenza or Epstein-Barr virus, they could be to blame. For Usman himself, this was a clear trigger. As a kid, he got sick a lot. And each time I would get sick, I would have these sensations where things are either moving in slow motion or my own body parts were unusually large. It would happen consistently every time I would be ill, and so much so that I would actually fear getting sick because I knew that I was going to have these sensations. According to Usman, one idea about how infections might cause Alice in Wonderland syndrome is that when you get a

fever, it can change the way that blood flows in your brain. And if that area of the brain affects vision or is linked to perception, then maybe that's what triggers the wonky vision. Curiously Barbara did tell me that while her little boy was generally healthy he did have a string of fevers in the weeks leading up to his world shrinking. So maybe those fevers had somehow affected his brain? One clue as to what brain areas might be involved comes from a patient of Usman's, a 15-year-old girl who started experiencing Alice in Wonderland syndrome and even had an episode right in front of him. She felt that her fingers were elongating so that she could switch off the light switch on the wall.

And, you know, we saw her kind of moving her hands up and down and we said, you know, what are you doing? And she says, oh, I'm trying to turn the light switch on. She didn't realize that it was on the other side of the room. She felt that her finger was right there. Now, in this particular case, the girl had epilepsy, and her epilepsy was associated with a part of the brain that processes visual information called the occipital lobe.

And so we felt that it was giving kind of false information to the vision centersital lobe. And so we felt that it was giving kind of false information to the vision centres of our brain. But Usman says there's unlikely to be just one Alice in Wonderland syndrome spot in your brain. It's not like that. All of the research that I've come across, at least, has identified multiple different areas of the brain. Sometimes it's the temporal lobe, sometimes occipital lobe.

In fact, there's a lot that we're still figuring out here. Like, why do some kids get fevers and have these it's happening again moments, but most don't? You could say we're a bit Tweedledum about the science. We'll edit in that other laugh from before, I think. Just quickly, this syndrome can happen in adults too, and it's mostly linked to migraines, which also affect blood flow to the brain. Interestingly, Lewis Carroll suffered from migraines, so some people have speculated

that maybe he had these bizarre symptoms, and that's what inspired Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The good news is, as far as we know, the syndrome isn't dangerous. For most kids, they just grow out of it and they're totally fine. Which brings us back to Barbara. Over time, she just got heaps less anxious about her son's mysterious condition. I calmed down and actually I became blasé, you know.

It's happening again, yeah, whatever, go out and play. And eventually, when the little boy was about six years old, it's happening again, just stopped happening. There were many times you said, it's happening again. It's not just one or two. But that's great. But I said you. But there were many times. Times my son. Yeah, so let's go for a mum.

Now, I don't usually coach people when we're interviewing for the show, but my mum just kept giving away the ending. Like, when was the last time? Do you remember it happening? I remember you coming home from school in kindy. I remember him coming home from school. I remember him coming home from school in kindy in the car. That's right, the little boy is me.

A tragic tale of a cute kid turned science journalist. It's, like, got a terrible ending. I told Mum about everything that I'd learned reporting the story. So I looked into this and it's actually a thing with a name. So it's called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. Really? Really? I'm absolutely stunned.

And I can't believe, because I'm a Google maniac, I can't believe that I didn't Google it. I'm really peeved that you did. Just don't tell me that it's damaged you, OK? Just don't tell me I didn't damaged you, okay? Just don't tell me I didn't look into it enough and you're damaged. After I convinced mum that there were no lasting effects and that any damage to my brain has been purely self-inflicted, she was just excited that this decades-old mystery had finally been solved and I promised to never interview her for a story ever again.

Lovely. That's great. Thank you so much. Lovely chatting to you. I love you. Aww. Thanks, Joel. After the break, a story you'll wish your eyes could unsee. Welcome back. Today on the show, we're talking about when our eyes see lies. And now a tale about how when we want to believe something,

we can so easily be deceived. And this tale involves a creature who has a tale. It's a story about lemmings that Science Versus super fans might remember a version of from the very early days of the show. OK, so to start us off, let's find out what New Yorkers know about these little critters. Producer Otston Mitchell, who's now at The New York Times, hit the mean streets of Manhattan with a simple question.

Do you know what a lemming is? Like somewhere between a beaver and a cat. Like the face of a beaver, but slenderness, gracefulness that a cat may have. Kind of like a fleming, but it's a lemming. What's a fleming? Oh, like a flamingo? I'm thinking like a little bird or something like that,

but it can't be a bird because then they'd be able to fly, so it must be like a little rodent or something. Yes, lemmings are rodents. And this is the sound of an actual lemming. They hang out in the grassy tundra of the Arctic, a harsh landscape that's covered in snow for much of the year. And lemmings hide in burrows where they can stay warm and away from predators like the Arctic fox,

the snowy owl, and the peregrine falcon. And one more thing that you have to know about lemmings. They are the most fantastic animal in the world. This is Dorothy Erick at the Arctic University of Norway. Lemmings are really cute, honestly. Because they've got the cute tushy. They've got the cute little bottoms. Yeah.

They're, you know, they're like miniature bears. They're quite fluffy. They're a little bit clumsy when they run around on their short legs. A quick Google image search will turn up pages of these little puffballs scampering around on the snow, chilling in patches of grass. Austin Mitchell showed some photos to people on the street. Oh, my gosh. It's super cute. That's an adorable little creature.

Yeah, I would pet that. But their cute looks isn't the thing that lemmings are famous for. There's, of course, something else. What do you think of when you think of lemmings? Animals running off cliffs. Suicide, right? They jump off cliffs together in packs. Isn't that like the animal that runs off a cliff or something like that? Like a huge number of them.

And it's about some sense of group mentality or crowd mentality. And this is our idea about lemmings. Silly little animals marching blindly off to their silly little deaths. And it's so ingrained in our culture that lemmings, the word, has become synonymous with people blindly following something, often to their destruction. Jim Cramer, host of Mad Money, describes investors on Wall Street as lemmings.

Could this be National Lemming Day? There's lemmings all over the place! Earlier this year, Republicans called young Democratic voters lemmings. And after a poor batting performance, Aussie cricketers were recently compared to lemmings. And who could forget that video game, The Lemmings? The whole point of the game was to build bridges fast enough

so that lemmings wouldn't fall off cliffs to their death, which is really dark when you think about it. And it turns out there's a few different species of lemmings, but the one that probably inspired all of this, the very idea that mindless lemmings just follow each other to their death, are the lemmings found in Norway, which have been creatively named by scientists Lemmis Lemmis. Now these lemmings do something that has bemused and befuddled people for centuries. The Norwegian lemming population explodes every four years or so.

Dorothy, our lemming expert, she's actually seen this. There are so many, you just see them everywhere. If you drive along the road, you will see them crossing the road. I mean, possible to catch them with your hands. Dorothy says it's not like this is a carpet of lemmings, but there are a lot around. In 1975, it was estimated that during this boom period, per hectare, the number of Norwegian lemmings grew more than 1,000 times.

That's like a rural town transforming into New York City once every four years or so. And all these lemmings, they become this furry little buffet for all the cool Arctic predators to have a field day on. So all Arctic fox dens have a lot of pups, snowy owls are breeding with many chicks, the whole tundra is in a way in such a super rich state. So lemmings all over. But as quickly as the lemmings appear, soon they're gone. And by the next year or so, their numbers drop to the point where scientists even have troubles finding them.

In a low year, how would it be different? Well, in a low year, you don't see lemmings. Right. They're just completely absent. So what we have is puffballs everywhere, and then puffballs practically nowhere. So mysterious are these lemming eruptions that for centuries, scholars have tried to explain them. In the 1500s, one scholar said that they fell from the sky during booms. And what of the busts? Well, 200 years ago, Sir Arthur de Capplebrook, one of the first fellows of the Royal Geographical Society,

was told that thousands of lemmings had, quote, been carried away by the currents and drowned, end quote. Thousands of lemmings drowned. But how was it? Could it really be mass suicide? Were these rodents blindly following each other to their death? By the 20th century, this seemed certain. A 1924 paper described, quote, the spectacle of processions of lemmings ecstatically throwing themselves

over the ends of railway bridges and falling to an apparently useless death below is a direct quote from a paper. Continues, quote, The sea strewn with dead lemmings like leaves on the ground after a storm. And just like that, newspapers wrote about the mass suicide as if it was a fact. But one thing was still missing. No one had ever recorded the event.

Until... The Lemming. Here's an actual living legend. For it's said of this tiny animal that it commits mass suicide by rushing into the sea in droves. This is from White Wilderness, a documentary about Arctic wildlife released by Walt Disney Productions in 1958. Film crews braved the unforgiving Arctic to film walruses, polar bears, seals, and yes, lemmings in their natural habitat.

They filmed lemmings getting lost while searching for food. Lemmings in their burrows with their young. And then we see something remarkable. Droves of lemmings start scurrying across the tundra. They're running towards one clear final destination. Once in motion, none stops to ask why. And carried along by an unreasoning hysteria... Hordes of lemmings are seen scurrying to a cliff.

Each falls into step for a march that will take them to a strange destination. We see a sheer rock face overlooking the massive water below. I can't emphasise how big this cliff is. It's terrifying. They reach the final precipice. This is the last chance to turn back. Yet over they go, casting themselves bodily out into space. Over they go, scores of lemmings plunging off the cliff edge and flying helplessly through the air,

end over end, until they finally smash into the water. And soon the Arctic Sea is dotted with tiny bobbing bodies. Little dead puffballs floating on the surface. And so is acted out the legend of mass suicide and destruction of a species. And for their remarkable efforts, the filmmakers were awarded the 1959 Academy Award for Best Documentary Film. The footage is unbelievable. I mean, really unbelievable. The only problem is, you shouldn't believe it.

Bill Carrick, a Canadian cameraman who worked on White Wilderness admitted that the lemming scene was kind of faked. Here he is in a TV documentary about animal cruelty in filmmaking called Cruel Camera, which was made by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1982. It was a recreated thing done in Canmore

in Alberta. If you didn't catch that, he said it was a recreated thing. You say recreated, how? Well, they built a set that looked like the Arctic and had a nice painted sky for a background. Yeah. They didn't even bother going to the Arctic.

It was filmed in Alberta, Canada. Just a cheeky, you know, 7,000 kilometres from Norway, give or take. And the lemmings were purchased from kids who ran around and collected the little puffballs for a quarter each. But then what of that great moment?

You know, the final precipice? If this was a recreated thing, well, then how did they get the footage of the lemmings diving off the cliff? Well, it's probably the worst thing you're imagining right now. The Disney film crew heaved the critters off a cliff. They literally forced the puffballs off a cliff and into a nearby river.

We told our New Yorkers about it. What? Oh, my God. They killed little animals? Yeah, that's really messed up. Oh, my God. They killed little animals? Yeah, that's really messed up. Oh, my God. Jesus. Wow.

Wow. Poor little puffballs. It's a shame that that sort of thing has to happen. Here's Roy Disney, Walt's nephew, talking about the film years later in that CBC documentary Cruel Camera. As I recall, they did stage some of that. As Roy admitted that the footage was faked, he still tried to justify it? We've lost a few lemmings, OK.

You know, the lemmings probably would have gotten lost anyway. Actually, Roy, the lemmings wouldn't have gotten lost anyway. Because it's not just that Disney faked the moment of them all jumping off a cliff. It's that these moments don't actually happen. That's right, the one thing that, you know, a lot of people think about Lemmings, this mass suicide that they all jump off cliffs in hordes at once,

it's not true either. In other words, here's Dorothy, our lemming expert again. No, they don't commit suicide. We've all been lied to about these little critters. Which does leave us with one big mystery. Remember how the whole idea of this started? Because lemming populations have these mysterious swings, you know, from boom to bust and then back again. And people couldn't explain it. So they were kind

of like, mass suicide? But if mass suicide isn't responsible, then I asked Dorothy, what exactly is going on here? This is actually a quite interesting question. There has been a lot of controversy about what causes the lemming cycles. One recent review paper said that despite scientists trying to work this out for about a century, it is still an enigma. But Dorothy told me on a basic level, here's probably what's happening. The boom part of the cycle kicks off when conditions are just right. Tasty food is all about, and happy lemmings start living their best life.

They go bonking like mad, and oh boy can lemmas lemmas get laid. On average, one female lemming can pop out around seven pups, and she can do this every month or so. So lemmas lemmas can turn into lemmas lemmas lemmas lemmas. Which can turn into lemmas lemmas lemmas lemmas lemmas lemmas. Lemmas. You get the point. The population explodes.

Oh, wow. So in a peak year, you can really grow bananas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So their population can grow really fast. At some point, there are just too many lemmings. It becomes easier for predators to pick them out. It can get stressful for the lemmings. One researcher told us that they can get territorial and perhaps start turning on each other. He told us that this can take a toll, can be really stressful. And ultimately, the lemmings don't breed like they used to.

While we're not entirely sure exactly how the lemming apocalypse starts to go down, things go bad for the little puffballs. But still, the few that survive eventually start making babies again, and then those babies make babies, and so the cycle goes on. But while lemmings aren't dying from mass suicide in parts of the Arctic, like around Norway, their numbers are dropping, for the same reason that's threatening a lot of animals, including human animals. Climate change. Lemmings are already suffering

because the lemmings live under the snow. Lemmings build nests and dig burrows in the soft crumbly snow where they can hide from predators. But warming weather means that at certain times in the year, that lovely soft snow melts and then refreezes in a way that makes it hard and icy. So the lemmings can't get to their food and they can die on the snow, which Dorothy says is sad. Well, of course it's sad when you see them dead on the snow. Climate change is sad, especially for people who love the Arctic. I'm sorry we couldn't have a Disney ending for you.

And so, after all this, how do we feel about lemmings? I love lemmings now. I don't feel like calling people lemmings ever again. And they're not mindless animals just walking off of a cliff. Right. Someone gave them a bad name, you know? Maybe they're just like, would love to turn around

and go into the world and enjoy it like everyone else, you know? That's Science Fesses. Hey Wendy. Hey, Joel. How you doing? I'm all right. I'm recovering from life on the road. How are you?

Yes, yeah, I feel like the Rolling Stones, basically, you know. So, Joel, how many citations are in this week's episode? We had 89 citations this week. 89. And if people want to see them learn more about lemmings or Alice in Wonderland syndrome or chiberas, where should they go? Well, they should check the show notes for the episode that they're listening to.

And in the show notes we have a link that takes them to a transcript and our transcripts are fully annotated with lots of wonderful additional information. Yes. And one thing that I really want to get from the audience, from you guys listening, is when we did this show live, a couple of people came up to us after and said, oh, my God, as a kid I had Alice in Wonderland syndrome, right?

And they said they didn't know. For one person it seemed like this was quite life-changing, right? It was super cool to hear other people's experiences. I feel like we need a support group or something to hang out and chat. But yeah, if anyone else experienced these kind of bizarre symptoms and have had them unexplained for decades, please get in touch. We'd love to hear from you. Yeah, let us know.

So you can either just come to Instagram, science underscore VS, or my TikTok, which is at Wendy Zuckerman, and we'll have little things up about Alice in Wonderland syndrome. So tell us if this was you. Thanks so much, Joel. Thanks, Wendy. Thanks, Wendy. This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman,

Joel Werner and Austin Mitchell, with help from Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang and Nicholas Delrose. Our original version of The Lemming Story was helped into the world by Caitlin Sorey, Ben Kebrick, Heather Rogers and Truti Ravindran. Editing by Blythe Terrell and Annie Rose Strasser. Fact-checking by Carmen Drahl. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord and Bumi Hidaka. Scoring by Bobby Lord, Peter Leonard,

Bumi Hidaka and Emma Munger. Thanks to all of the researchers that we spoke to for this episode, including Dr Malte Anderson, Dr Anders Anderbjorn, Dr Rolf Anker-Imms, Dr Charles Krebs and others. A big thanks to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for the use of Cruel Camera and a special thanks to Barbara and Paul Werner Tegan Taylor Joseph LaBelle Wilson and the Zuckerman family

I'm Wendy Zuckerman Back to you next time