can animals commit suicide?

Question

does it happen? if so then what animals is it?

Answer 1

Any Bee except bumble bees commit suicide when they sting something. The barbs on the end of their stinger lodge in the skin and when the bee flies away or is slapped away the Poison sac and stinger are torn out of it's body thus killing the bee. So the bee is acting more like a Kamikaze then just committing suicide.

Answer 2

Some male spiders sacrifice themselves in order to mate with the generally larger female.

Some ants, specifically the workers kill themselves by setting off a chemical reaction that causes the individual to explode and cover the attacker with a sticky substance.

Note that in both these cases it does not effect the fitness of the animal in an evolutionary sense. The spider gets to mate and ants are so genetically close to each other that is beneficial to the whole super organism.

Lemmings do not commit suicide it's a myth, they may accidentally fall off a cliff due to poor eyesight

Answer 3

If you mean, "Other than humans, do otherwise healthy and reproductively-capable individuals of any other species perform actions foreseeably guaranteed to result in their immediate death?", the answer is NO. Violate any one of the conditions in the preceding statement, and the answer is YES. Sick or injured animals of many different types will act in such ways as to guarantee a speedier end to their suffering, and this appears to include whale beachings. Whale beachings are also one reason for the qualifier "foreseeable," in that it appears healthy whales may follow a sick leader when the latter beaches--as social animals, they instinctively trust their leader, which under most circumstances would not lead them to their doom, so their unexpected (to them) beaching cannot be considered genuinely suicidal. For that matter, a rabbit that walks out into an open field when there's a hungry owl nearby may be performing an action virtually guaranteed to result in death--but not foreseeably so. Nor would an animal that dies defending its young necessarily be considered suicidal, even if the enemy is something pretty much impossible to defeat; after all, the enemy might retreat if it doesn't seem worth the trouble, so sometimes defense works.

The reason for the clause "reproductively-capable" is that there are many social insects with sterile, suicidal soldiers or workers--for example, termite soldiers that explode their bodies, which are filled with sticky guts, immobilizing their enemies in goo. As a final note, the stuff about lemmings jumping off cliffs, of course, is a myth.

Answer 4

I ll tell you something really interesting.
Female pigs that have piglets to feed with their milk, after some time they become very weak. If they don' t get enough food they starting transformating their fat and then their protein (flesh) to milk for the offspring.
This is amazing, they know that they are so weak, they understand that they will die but they still doing this in order to feed their children.
And finally they die, this is a real suicide, but it has its purpose.
Anyway, as an animal nutritionist I know that we have to provide the appropriate food to the female mother before this happens, but as a man (male) I can feel shocked of the power of the females sometimes have!

Answer 5

I'm not sure about suicide, but I have seen that if an animal is in a bad state and has been suffering for a long length of time, it will give in and leave itself to pass away.

Answer 6

The only animal i know of that purposely commits suicide are captive dolphins. Trainers teach them to flip onto their backs and expose their bellies to the public they can do this and hold there breaths for up to eight minutes however some are known to stay under longer suffocating themselves, if trainers flip them back over the dolphins will purposely flip back over, killing themselves. It is usually due to depression in captivity or some genetic marker. I only know of one case at paradise cove in Orlando. I was told by one of the trainers when i went there one summer.

Answer 7

Lemmings appear to commit suicide.

In certain years, these small furry creatures make for the cliffs on the Norwegian coast, and hurl themselves over into the sea.

Some say that it is nature's way of sorting out the excess population in fertile years.

Answer 8

No animals commit suicide that I'm aware of. Lemmings will fall off of cliffs due to overcrowding, and certain cliff-dwelling birds will plummet to their deaths in their first attempt to fly, but none deliberately kill themselves, other than humans.

Answer 9

I was the care giver for my cat Eliot for over 15 years. When we made our last move into the house we live in now...he moved in with the next door neighbor by his own choosing. Three years later he came and sat on my lap on the front porch one night for about an hour. He purred and snuggled me just like the old days. The next day he layed down under the neighbors car tire and she ran over him. I was sure he had come to tell me goodbye...cats that are 18 years old know better than laying under a tire and he was a truly smart cat.

Answer 10

yes, but usually by accident. Lemmings supposedly commit suicide, but it's not actually true. They sometimes accidently push each other off of cliffs when they get too crowded up.