Lemmings need better P.R. They don't get much mention, and when they do, they are always following each other off cliffs. To their deaths.

The business press, in particular, seems to have adopted the furry little Arctic rodent as the perfect metaphor for self-destructive followership. Investors follow a once-soaring stock, employees follow a once-admired executive, a company follows a once-promising technology.

To where? Off a cliff. Every time.

There's even a business book called "The Lemming Dilemma" in which, according to its back cover blurb, "Emmy the lemming wakes up to her own purpose and vision, and defies the age-old urge to follow the other lemmings off the cliff."

The problem is, according to a study being published today in the journal Science, lemmings do not follow each other off cliffs!

And the only reason most people think they do is footage faked by Walt Disney Studios in a 1958 "nature" film, "White Wilderness," that portrayed lemmings as oblivious nincompoops who reduced their excess population by diving off cliffs in mass suicides.

The hoax planted one of the most enduring myths in popular culture -- and in science. Which really ticks off the scientists who study lemmings.

"The Disney movie was a fake," said Heikki Henttonen, a expert with the Finnish Forest Research Institute in Vantaa. "An irritating one to zoologists," he added, "not only because the behavior was faked, but they used a wrong species. Disgusting."

Oliver Glig couldn't agree more. He's a specialist in population biology at the University of Helsinki who headed the study of lemming population control that's being published today in Science.

Glig's study found that lemmings go through a 4-year cycle in which populations explode, reaching hundreds of times original levels, and then crash because of periodic increases in the numbers of predators that eat lemmings, such as arctic foxes and snowy owls. The sharp population declines have nothing to do with overcrowding or food shortages or, of all things, mass suicide.

Ecologists have spent 50 years searching for this explanation, partly because lemmings can help scientists understand behavior in more complex animals.

Glig's study makes no reference to the movie "White Wilderness," part of Disney's "True Life Adventure" series which is still sold in VHS format. But the topic arose during interviews this week with Glig, his fellow researchers and other scientists.

"White Wilderness" was filmed in Alberta, Canada, which is not a native habitat for lemmings and has no outlet to the sea. Filmmakers put purchased lemmings on a snow-covered lazy-Susan and spun it to create the illusion of frenzied behavior. Then they herded the animals off a river bank for the "lemmings-to-the-sea" scene.

Glig said in an interview that Disney paid young Inuits from Barrow, Alaska, one dollar per animal to trap lemmings.

Disney doesn't defend such practices nowadays.

"Although we have been unable to accurately determine exactly what techniques were used in producing 'White Wilderness' in 1958, standards and techniques for filmmaking were very different 40 years ago," said Rena Langley, of Walt Disney World Public Affairs.

Documentation of what took place is readily available, however.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. ran an expose on the film in 1983. Henttonen told the story in a 1993 book. And Riley Woodford, of the Alaska Department of Wildlife, has written an article on lemmings and "White Wilderness" in the current issue of the department's magazine.

To be fair, the lemming myth has some basis in fact, said Dr. Peter J. Hudson of Pennsylvania State University. Lemmings in Norway and other regions do migrate periodically with huge masses of animals bubbling over the landscape, he said. In the process, some are forced over cliffs or jump into rivers and lakes in order to swim across. This kind of migration occurs every 30 years. The next one is due at any time.