[Animals] Why medium-sized animals are the fastest

[MosterOfficial ☆]

A new study from Imperial College London has answered an old question about why medium-sized land animals, such as cheetahs, tend to be faster. There is a discrepancy in the animal kingdom. While many key traits, such as strength, limb length, lifespan, and brain size, tend to increase with animal size, maximum running speeds tend to be greater in animals of size medium. To explore why, an international team of researchers including Imperial, Harvard University, the University of Queensland and the University of the Sunshine Coast developed a physical model of how muscles, the universal animal motor, set limits on speeds. running maximums of terrestrial animals. Lead author Dr David Labonte, from the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London, said in a statement: "The fastest animals are neither large elephants nor small ants, but those of intermediate size, such as cheetahs. Why does running speed break the regular patterns that govern most other aspects of animal anatomy and performance? Their findings suggest that there is not one limit to maximum running speed, as previously thought, but two: how fast and to what extent the muscles contract. The maximum speed an animal can reach is determined by whichever limit is reached first, and that limit is dictated by the size of the animal. Co-author Professor Christofer Clemente, from the University of the Sunshine Coast and the University of Queensland, said: "The key to our model is understanding that maximum running speed is limited both by how quickly the muscles contract and by how much They can shorten during a contraction. "Cheetah-sized animals exist at a physical sweet spot of around 50 kg, where these two limits coincide. Consequently, these animals are the fastest, reaching speeds of up to 105 kilometers per hour."

https://www.cronica.com.mx/academia/animales-tamano-mediano-son-veloces.html