They've inspired a successful video game, and provided people around the world with a new word for suicidally-enthusiastic crowd-followers, but new research from Norway indicates that the venerable lemming may be in serious trouble from the effects of climate change.

Though best known for charging en masse into the sea, lemmings instead spend their lives in a layer of space between the ground and the first, drier layers of snowfall. Only in particularly dry winters, when lemmings numbers swelled beyond what their habitats could support, did the fuzzy little rodents leap into the sea in search of more land.

But now, heavier, wetter snows are leading to smaller, less stable spaces between the snow and the ground, keeping lemming numbers down. While climate change impacting larger, more-slowly-growing species is nothing new, the lemming problem could represent the beginning of a disturbing trend. Furthermore, the population impacts could spread across the larger Arctic ecosystem, as lemmings provide a valuable food source for a range of predators, from birds of prey to foxes.