The secret lives of speedster cheetahs

animal’s position, its speed and the direction it is heading in up to 300 times a second and relays that information to the researchers. Three female and two male cheetahs wore these collars for 18 months, during which 367 hunting “runs” were recorded.

Wilson says he was surprised at how slowly cheetahs ran during a hunting run, for example. The fastest hit 106km/h, but much of the time the animals topped out at about 60 percent that speed, and maintained that pace for just one or two seconds as they ran down impala.

Instead, hunting success depended on the cheetah’s ability to outmanoeuvre the prey. By slowing down by 4m per second in a single stride, the cat could reach its target then quickly decrease its speed to make sharp turns.

The rate of speeding up and slowing down was double that of polo horses, and cheetahs accelerated with four times the power of the fastest human sprinters, Wilson and his colleagues said. They observed that even with this prowess, the cheetah brings down an impala or other game only once in four tries.

Challenging conventional wisdom, the research also revealed that cheetahs don’t restrict their hunting to open grassland or to dawn. About half the time they hunted in the open, but about a quarter of the time they were among shrubs and large trees, and sometimes even in dense vegetation. Hunting took place during the day as well as at dawn. “What they found out about cheetahs is not what we thought,” researcher Dave Carrier says. He and other researchers are impressed with the detail of the information that Wilson was able to collect. “It’s the life and death struggle of the speedsters of the savanna,” says Thomas Roberts, a biomechanist at Brown University.

“And it is all recorded digitally, live, with technology that allows you to watch the animal’s path on a Google map. This kind of technology has the potential to transform our understanding of animal behaviour and better plan conservation and management of animals.”

Having day-in and day-out data for individual animals over months “is such a giant leap forward”, says Carrier, who hopes to see other species studied in this way.

Wilson is now following lions, wild dogs and domestic cats with these collars. – Washington Post

MOVE IT: The cheetah is the fastest land animal.