If so, which ones?

What are their motives?

No. Good question though.

http://www.tonmo.com/articles/octosuicide.php

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbugsuicide.html

http://www.freep.com/news/nw/dogsuicides-bar14w_20050804.htm

lemmings?or is that an accident?

nope,just looked it up.its accidental.

Actually, kenworth, it wasn't an accident.
The lemmings were culled together on a turntable to make it appear there was more of them migrating (on a cliff that wasn't even on their migratory route), then deliberately "pushed" off the cliff by the film makers to make for a more interesting "Nature Documentary".
It was closer to murder than suicide.
And Walt Disney's Fairy Tale lives on still.

As far as what was said in the links about whales...
It irritates me that "scientists" decide what the "intentions" of the whales were.
Fact of the matter is, we do not know if they were "lost and confused" or not.
I have seen at least one account of a pod of whales that each member seemingly intentionally beached itself and stayed there until the leader died, then, voluntarily went back to sea.
It could very well be a suicide on the part of the leader, knowing his ailing health would lead the pod astray, and mourning and respect on behalf of the other pod members.

We simply don't know.

Actually, kenworth, it wasn't an accident.
The lemmings were culled together on a turntable to make it appear there was more of them migrating (on a cliff that wasn't even on their migratory route), then deliberately "pushed" off the cliff by the film makers to make for a more interesting "Nature Documentary".
It was closer to murder than suicide.
And Walt Disney's Fairy Tale lives on still.

yeah that was what i read,i was reffering to the fact that lots of them try to migrate and drown in lakes and rivers etc.guess they just arent too clever.i do quite like that cute and fluffy disney murdered tonnes of animals to make a documentary on their "natural" behaviour.

i do quite like that cute and fluffy disney murdered tonnes of animals to make a documentary on their "natural" behaviour.
Me too! :p

I believe that the term "suicide" means a conscious decision to end a life. It presumes that something is sentient and knows what it is doing.... I strongly disagree with referring to animals jumping off cliffs (such as lemmings) as suicides. I don't think that is suicide. In the case of wolf spiders being devoured by their young, the female is dying because of an inbuilt response - it's not a conscious decision like suicide. The female has simply lived her life and chemicals are released that start to kill her. The babies take advantage!

The same thing happens with the female octopus. When her eggs mature, she has lived her life and dies. This actually makes space for the future development of offspring and increases food for them. In addition, the young octopuses don't have to compete with adults who would prey on them, too
Again, suppositions and anthropomorphism.
We don't know what the octopus (or any other animal) knows or does not know.

(not to mention that the author is apparently unaware of the lemmings farce)

i cant find the page, but if you will search through newscientist you will find an article on seals that climb up a hill, whchi takes days to climb, only to jump off it to their deaths. they have found something like 80 bodies undreath that one cliff

Birds - fly into windows
Deer - run into cars
Possums - ditto
Raccoons - ditto
Squirrels - ditto
Fish - they obviously must know by now that the damn worm on the fishing line is BAD

...and other assortment of creatures

Oh come on. Animals collide with cars because their brains can't handle the kinematics of objects moving at such a high rate of speed.

If you're not being serious, excuse me. I don't have the gene for sarcasm.

But thats not suicide, theys just there nature.

Birds - Can't see that great
Deer - Curious
Possoums - ditto
Raccoons - ditto
Squirrels - dittos
Fish - Hungry/curious [most who find the hook bad are not there to tell the tale]

Although I do think some birds have a suicidial nature. Every time we drive a bird gets in front of the car....

I don't think there can be any doubt that animals do 'commit suicide'. Or, rather, they lose the will to live and therefore die.

Many animals die in captivity simply because they lack the will to live in such a state. Isn't this a form of suicide?

Many social animals lose the will to live when removed from their social groups.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of these animals, rather than just dying from neglect, put themselves in dangerous situtations. Attacking predators. Hell. Never know, some might even court death on the road.


Anyway, the lemmings mad dash off the cliff is a hoax then?
Really?

Sorry for being sarcasm-heavy there fraggle rocker :p

Anyway, the lemmings mad dash off the cliff is a hoax then?
Really?
Yep.

On more than one level...


Disney's White Wilderness was filmed in Alberta, Canada, which is not a native habitat for lemmings and has no outlet to the sea. Lemmings were imported for use in the film, purchased from Inuit children by the filmmakers. The Arctic rodents were placed on a snow-covered turntable and filmed from various angles to produce a "migration" sequence; afterwards, the helpless creatures were transported to a cliff overlooking a river and herded into the water. White Wilderness does not depict an actual lemming migration — at no time are more than a few dozen lemmings ever shown on the screen at once. The entire sequence was faked using a handful of lemmings deceptively photographed to create the illusion of a large herd of migrating creatures.


Snopes Article Source (http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.htm)

“ Originally Posted by Scopes Article
Disney's White Wilderness was filmed in Alberta, Canada, which is not a native habitat for lemmings and has no outlet to the sea. Lemmings were imported for use in the film, purchased from Inuit children by the filmmakers. The Arctic rodents were placed on a snow-covered turntable and filmed from various angles to produce a "migration" sequence; afterwards, the helpless creatures were transported to a cliff overlooking a river and herded into the water. White Wilderness does not depict an actual lemming migration — at no time are more than a few dozen lemmings ever shown on the screen at once. The entire sequence was faked using a handful of lemmings deceptively photographed to create the illusion of a large herd of migrating creatures.
”
Shit. I mean damn... I mean... What the fuck? All this time? The whole lemming thing? A disney fabrication? Who the hell came up with such a fucked up idea and why???

*picks sagging jaw off of desk top* :eek:

Why?
According to the article...
Nature documentaries are notoriously difficult to film, as wild animals are not terribly cooperative. Many nature shows and films of this era — including Disney's "True-Life Adventure" movies and TV's Wild Kingdom — staged events to capture exciting footage for their audiences.

Apparently this has happened quite a bit in other documentaries too.

It's a sad sad state of affairs, if you ask me.

Crap. First Santa, then the easter bunny, now disney. Such disillusionment. Life is sooo dissapointing at times...

Have you noticed, when cats wait on the kerb and then dash out to the other side of the road as you approach in your car? They wait until the last moment and then make the mad dash, usually under the belly of the car between the front and back wheels! I believe they can do this feat up to nine times before ending up as road pizza.

So I guess the consensus is that animals can loose the will to live. But the question is- are there any animals with enough self-awareness to actively murder themselves?

Seals aren't smart enough to jump off cliffs, and cats are always testing their reflexes. Attempted suicide? Probably not.

Read the news from Turkey? About a sheep which freefell to death and had its hundreds and hundreds of pals doing the same, over a quarter of those sheep died from falling...... XD Dunno what triggers that.... any guess?

If humans are stupid enough to commit suicide, I'm sure some other animals are.

I think the scorpions kill themselves.

Cattle have also been known to Stampeed and cause fatalities near cliff edges, however thats pretty much fear causing them to do strange things.

Gnats/Mosquito's are suicidal, well they are if they try feeding off of me (splat!)

Seriously, I would guess that nature is about survival since there are predators for most animal kind. Namely they don't have much chance to think about whether there life is going in the right direction or they end up someones lunch.

I suppose you could suggest the Humble Bee can be suicidal if it decides to sting someone because it's stinger is jagged and usually causes the abdomen to be torn from the bee, condemning it to death.

You then have Black Widow's and the Preying Mantis. I mention these because if a respective partner (male to the female) doesn't approach the female correctly, they can end up being a meal for her. (remember that the next time your suppose to take a lady on a date.) You could suggest that it's almost suicidal to put yourself in a predicament where you could get eaten.

cat,

scorpions will sting themselves when they are unable to escape from the threat so that the predator will be poisoned if eats the carcass, and will either die or not attack another scorpion.

it was a common passtime for troops stationed in egypt during ww1 to surround scorpions in a ring of fire and watch them sting themselves when they couldnt escape

I remember watching footage of a rhino banging it's head off metal bars until it died... But that's probably because it was disorientated being in a strange environment and was just too stupid to realise it was killing itself.

Our seventeen and half year old Malamut dog was having difficulty walking etc. One night, he left us for good...we never found him...we think, he knew the time has come and walked away to die. The smartest dog we know of.

cat,

scorpions will sting themselves when they are unable to escape from the threat so that the predator will be poisoned if eats the carcass, and will either die or not attack another scorpion.

it was a common passtime for troops stationed in egypt during ww1 to surround scorpions in a ring of fire and watch them sting themselves when they couldnt escape

Scorpions may sting themselves but I doubt they do it for the reasons you cite. It doesn't make any sense from an evolutionary perspective.

just wanted to say birds have excellent sight

Many of the said cases of animal suicide can be elplaned by looking at the way severals navigate and communicate. Birds are a excellent example, we know that electromagnetic waves effect the way they naviage in migration pattens.

Therefore surely such mass bird suicides can be explaning with fluxes in the natural electromagnetic field of the earth resulting in mistaken collisions.

Similar hypotheses can also explain such occurences in lemmings etc, although i have read of cases involving dogs apparently jumping from bridges in a town in Germany. For this I find no scientific explanation.

As others have said, lemmings don't commit suicide.

However, some female spiders eat their mates after sex and some have observed that the male spiders actually cooperate in their demise.

There are many observations of what amounts to biological suicide. The octopus stops eating after reproducing and commits suicide by starvation.

Some think aging is essentially biological suicide. See http://www.azinet.com/aging/

Read the news from Turkey? About a sheep which freefell to death and had its hundreds and hundreds of pals doing the same, over a quarter of those sheep died from falling...... XD Dunno what triggers that.... any guess?


Herd mentality. Mob rules. One of the sheep's parents probably asked him that morning, "well if Baaab jumps off of a cliff, would you follow him?"

That and ovicaprids are stupid.

Therefore surely such mass bird suicides can be explaning with fluxes in the natural electromagnetic field of the earth resulting in mistaken collisions.
No, birds are just stupid as shit.

I don't think animals, other than humans, have a conscious "will to live" per say - it is mostly instinctive (part of their geneticically evolved survival strategy). The key is their development and extent of their "consciousness." Do they even know what death is? And, if so, what would make them to choose that route if they knew it was an even an option, as humans sometimes do? I think a lot of mammals do know what death is, but they don't really understand it, and don't understand it in the same way that humans do, and don't have the intellectual complexity of thought to contemplate if they would want to do the same.

For example, many mammals linger around their dead mate after it is gone, but eventually seem to understand that she or he is no more, and then depart. Dogs seem to be an exception, and the only exception that I can think of. There have been countless documented cases where a dog (lifespan of 10-20 years) has bonded to its master so close that after its master dies, the dog sometimes will to. As to why the dog dies, this is open to speculation. It does not do anything to "commit suicide," but maybe just dies of something similar to like what we humans might call "a broken heart." But yet a human that dies from a broken heart is not committing suicide.

A lot of the replies on this thread have been referring to accidental animal deaths, some of which have been suggested as being attributed to anthropomorphic characteristics. Remember that anthropomorphism is the interpretation or the attributing of human characteristics to non-human things. It is difficult to do - since we do not have the mind of a cat, a dog, or a lemming - but to answer this question objectively, we can't limit our thoughts or be stuck in the box of anthropomorphic explanations.

so, what are ya'll saying - You don't know!! ??

are all whale beachings disorientation due to navy sonar?

the thing is suicide goes against the instinct of survival. I just can't believe we are stumped.
deer masturbate themselves if that's not redundant. animals get drunk, I've seen chimps falling down drunk from natural fermentation - and I swear they knew what they were up to.
but suicide? what about after mating....then life could become pointless...like a male praying mantis knowing once he screws that babe she's gonna eat him....maybe he was so hard up he figured, hey, it's worth it. Could that be suicide?

oh...ok...maybe she was sooo goood he like figured he had nothing else to live...of course.

I doubt the male praying mantis knows in advance he's going to be the females dinner, or that even the female knows in advance that she's going to eat him. That's being anthropomorphic. I think she just does it afterwards by spontaneous instinct.

Yeah, for lower forms of life suicide would go against that instinct for survival. No doubt there, right? So its not all just guessing. You can make likely predictions based on the more we learn from their behavior and physiology, like whale and dolphin beaching due to some sort of disorientation. There's really a lot of research going on about that. I think we'll know the answer to that one pretty soon - but its not suicide.