The cheetah is the fastest animal on land, its top speed can reach 104 kilometers per hour, and if it runs on China's highways, it will be ticketed by the traffic police if it is faster.
Also running on their legs, cheetahs are much faster than other animals. Bolt, the world record holder for human sprints, has a top speed of 36 kilometers per hour, only one-third faster than a cheetah. The fastest racehorse, the Quart horse, has a top speed of 70 kilometers per hour, which is still far behind the cheetah. Lions, tigers and leopards, which are also cats as cheetahs, have a maximum speed of only 50 to 60 kilometers per hour.
Why can a cheetah run so fast?
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="01" data-track="55" > increase stride length & increase pace</h1>
If you want to run fast, you must take big steps and pound your legs diligently.
In order to expand its steps, the cheetah made four major modifications to its body:
The first makeover: replace yourself with two pairs of invincible long legs.
Compared with the "big cats" of the leopard subfamily, the cheetah's legs are particularly slender, which is consistent with the adversarial canines. At the same time, cheetahs have also made improvements to their leg structure similar to canines. Tigers and leopards have thighs longer than calves, while cheetahs have calves that are longer than thighs like wolves and African wild dogs. In this way, the cheetah's steps are far larger than the "big cats" of the leopard subfamily.
The second modification is to turn his spine into a "spring accelerator".
Cheetahs lengthen their legs and optimize the proportion of large and small legs are all in the same way as canines, but the speed of cheetahs is far better than that of canines, and the fastest dog, the Lingti, has a speed of only 65 kilometers per hour.
The reason for this is that cheetahs are cats after all, and their vertebral flexibility is incomparable to that of dogs. Cheetah is able to fold its flexible spine into a spring accelerator:
With each step, it first stretches the spine extremely, so that the hind legs are pushed back as far as possible and the front feet are extended as far forward as possible; then, the spine is extremely flexed so that the hind feet are placed in front of the front feet. With this stretch, you can use the elastic force to increase the stride length by 76 centimeters.
The cheetah's third transformation was so fierce that it directly removed its arms and shoulders.
The cheetah's collarbone is extremely degenerate, and only one ligament is connected between the forelimbs, shoulder blades and the body, that is, the cheetah is in a "dislocated" state at all times, and its body is equivalent to being "suspended" between the two front legs by ligaments. In this way, when the cheetah runs, as the forelimbs swing back and forth, the shoulder blades swing up and down, without causing any obstacles to the movement of the forelimbs, which further increases the stride length.
The last modification is to insert a pair of invisible wings for yourself.
Fast animals have a characteristic, that is, when they run, there will be a "galloping moment", when they are not on all fours, and their bodies continue to move forward by inertia. Cheetah's "gallop" is the most extreme, each step, "galloping" time accounts for more than 50%, that is to say, cheetahs are actually half running, half "flying".
Through these four major transformations, the cheetah increased its stride length to 7 meters, which is comparable to that of a galloping horse.
But the cheetah's legs are pounded more diligently, and the horse can only run two or three steps per second, while the cheetah can run four steps, so the cheetah is much faster than the horse.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="02" data-track="70" > the strongest logistical support</h1>
Now, cheetahs have installed the strongest power system for themselves, but to maintain extreme speed, logistics is also very important.
The cheetah's high-speed running consumes a lot of energy, so it enlarges its nasal cavity, deepens its chest cavity, and can inhale a large amount of fresh oxygen with each breath.
From the side, it can be clearly seen that its chest is significantly thicker than its abdomen, with a thin willow waist; while the leopard subfamily "big cat" is as thick as its chest and abdomen, with a bucket waist. The cheetah's deep chest cavity contains the top heart and lungs, which can transport oxygen-rich arterial blood to muscle cells as quickly as possible. This allows the cheetah to obtain sufficient energy through aerobic breathing.
Compared with the canine family, the cheetah belongs to the cat family after all, its explosive power is unmatched by the canine family, it is much faster than the canine family, and it can speed up to 75 kilometers per hour in two seconds. The four-wheeled sports car, the speed of 100 kilometers takes almost 1.5 seconds, and it is really remarkable that a cheetah with four legs can achieve this acceleration.
It is precisely because the cheetah concentrates all the advantages of cats and canines suitable for running that it can become the fastest animal.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="03" data-track="76" > the cost of high speed: war five slag </h1>
However, the cheetah also paid a heavy price in pursuit of speed, the most obvious point is that it has become a "scum of war".
First of all, in order to "reduce the burden", the cheetah gave up the traditional "unicorn arm" of the cat family. The big cats of the leopard subfamily are very stout, especially the front half of the body is particularly stout, like a wrestler. The cheetah, on the other hand, is more like a sprinter, slender and slender, so its arms do not have much strength, and it cannot easily put down large prey like other big cats.
Secondly, the cheetah ran too fast, in order to increase grip and prevent slippage, it imitated the canines, stretching out its paws when running, so that it was like wearing "nail shoes", fast and stable. But the downside of this is that its claws are as blunt as canines and are no longer lethal. Most cats cherish their claws as "swords", and usually withdraw the "sword scabbard" to maintain sharpness when they are not in use, and once the sword is bright, it is a fatal blow.
Moreover, due to the extreme expansion of the nasal cavity, the space is occupied by the nasal cavity, the cheetah's mouth is very small, the teeth are also very small, it has neither the large mouth of the canine family, nor the tusks of the cat family.
Canines bite their prey with their mouths, which cheetahs can't do.
Cats use fangs to perform tricks, such as tigers with broken neck vertebrae, jaguar headshots, these cheetahs can not do.
Cheetah's canine teeth are not only small, but also have no ability to pierce the cervical spine of prey.
The skull of a lion has a pronounced posterior gap of canine teeth
Other cats, in order to facilitate the perfect penetration of canine teeth into the cervical vertebrae of prey, have left a slit behind the canine teeth, and their canine teeth fit the cervical vertebra of their prey like keys and locks.
But the cheetah's mouth is too small to leave this slit, and when it bites the neck of the prey, the teeth behind the canine teeth will get in the way, causing its canine teeth to fail to pierce through. It can be said that in the process of pursuing extreme speed, the cheetah lost the key to open the cervical spine of the prey.
In this way, the cheetah's killing trick is only one, that is, biting the throat, pressing the prey's trachea, and suffocating the prey to death.
The cheetah was killed by the leopard
Therefore, although the cheetah is the same size as the leopard, the combat effectiveness is too far behind, not only the prey will be snatched away by the leopard, but even itself may become the leopard's plate food.
Leopards can kill 350 kg of zebras and half a ton of antelope, but cheetahs rarely exceed 40 kg of prey. The prey it can hunt is also very limited, mainly small and medium-sized antelopes. In particular, springboks and gazelles, which run fast but have little ability to resist. These antelopes are too fast, up to 80 to 90 kilometers per hour, lions, spotted hyenas and leopards are difficult to catch them, so these are considered "small stoves" opened by the "Creator" for cheetahs.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="04" data-track="91" > two major shortcomings: heat dissipation and charging</h1>
In addition to its weak combat effectiveness, cheetahs also have two shortcomings.
One is that the heat dissipation is slow, when the canines run, 80% of the heat can be dissipated, while the cheetah can only disperse 10%, so the speeding cheetah body temperature rises quickly. When the body temperature reaches a dangerous level, exceeding 40 degrees Celsius, the cheetah must stop. It can usually only keep running at high speed for more than ten seconds, chasing out a distance of several hundred meters, at which time it has to stop whether it has caught prey or not.
Another shortcoming is "slow charging", because the cheetah hunting consumes a lot of energy, after each hunt it is exhausted, even the strength to eat is gone, you must first rest for ten minutes, or even dozens of minutes. If other predators come to rob the cheetah before it is fully charged, the cheetah has no power to fight.
Africa's endless savannah not only gave birth to powerful predators, but also a paradise for "thieves" and "robbers". Therefore, leopards usually carry the corpses of animals to the tree as soon as they catch their prey, and lions and hyenas that do not go up the tree can only stare dryly. But due to the weakness of its forelimbs, blunt claws and other reasons, the cheetah will not go up the tree itself, so the only thing it can do is to drag the prey into the bushes, "recharge" as soon as possible, recover strength, and eat as many bites as possible before other predators arrive.
Scientists found that in East Africa, cheetahs lost 9.2 percent of their fresh meat to other predator raids.
Moreover, large predators, especially lions, often kill cheetah pups, and the adult cheetahs of the "five scum" are simply unable to protect their cubs. According to statistics, the survival rate of cheetah pups is less than 10%, and more than 70% of the pups are killed by lions.
Cheetah cubs
Therefore, the influence of dominant carnivores on cheetahs is very far-reaching. Cheetahs are very rare in areas where lions and hyenas are abundant, for example, in the East African steppes, cheetah density is only 2/3 of that of leopards, 1/4 of lions, and 1/9 of hyenas. When lions and hyenas are sharply reduced in number due to human hunting, cheetahs can live better.
Therefore, cheetahs learn to hold human "thighs" to get rid of the two "bullies" of lions and hyenas. In today's Africa, it is a farm area outside the reserve, and the most common large carnivorous animal is gone.
Since cheetahs are "scum of war" and pose no threat to humans, and farmers only need to raise a shepherd dog in the animal pen to drive out cheetahs and protect domestic animals, farmers can accept cheetahs and try their best to eliminate their predators - lions and hyenas.
In nature, no structure is perfect, and there are always advantages and disadvantages.