The Cheetah: What makes a record sprinter

Predators on the hunt for prey deliver top athletic performance.

Especially the cheetah.

With top speeds of around 100 kilometers per hour, it presents itself as the fastest sprinter in the entire animal kingdom.

Measurements in the wild showed that it can cover two hundred meters in seven seconds.

For comparison: Even a Usain Bolt needed more than 19 seconds for his world record for this distance.

Native to steppes and desert areas, the cheetah loves to prey on gazelles and other small ungulates.

If he has stalked unnoticed, he tries to catch up with the prey in a rapid sprint and throw it down.

With a high success rate, although he mostly stays well below his top speed and shows little stamina.

But how does this cat species manage to beat all four- and two-legged friends by far in terms of speed?

The fact that cheetahs are noticeably long-legged and slim does not seem to be a sufficient explanation.

Biologists led by Tomoya Kamimura from the Nagoya Institute of Technology and Shinya Aoi from Kyoto University recently investigated the important role played by the flexible spine by analyzing the dynamics of movement during sprinting using model calculations.

Forward in a floating gallop

In order to propel themselves at high speed, cheetahs run at a gallop, a gait at which quadrupeds temporarily have no ground contact at all.

Unlike horses, for example, cheetahs switch between two variants in this hovering phase: when they have just lost contact with the ground with their front paws, the front and rear legs move towards each other under the body, like a galloping horse.

On the other hand, if cheetahs have pushed off with their hind paws, their front and hind legs are stretched out wide.

This also stretches the backbone, which bends again when the front paws are lifted off.

In order to be able to take the deformation of the spine into account in a mathematical model, the Japanese researchers represented the body of the cheetah as two masses that are flexibly connected to each other by a spring.

This greatly simplifies the complex movement cycle.

However, the model can explain why the elegant cat of prey has to design successive hovering phases differently in order to achieve peak performance.

As Kamimura and his colleagues report in the "Scientific Reports", cheetahs could theoretically use only suspension phases of the type in which the spine is stretched when galloping.

Why cheetahs are so rare

Alternating the extension and curvature of the spine, however, allows for faster strides.

This leads to a faster pace because the hind paws make contact with the ground at a higher frequency.

Every time a galloping cheetah pushes off the ground with its hind legs, it accelerates vigorously.

It only brakes again when the front paws touch down.

The hind legs then swing forward again, after a short hovering phase, to provide another kick for acceleration.

However, the running technique optimized for maximum performance does not necessarily make cheetahs a model of success in evolution: Success in hunting is of little use to them if lions or hyenas come by and steal their prey.

In addition, both predators also like to attack the offspring of the cheetah.

It's no wonder that the specialist for lightning-fast sprints avoids stronger competitors as much as possible.

Perhaps one reason why cheetahs are so scarce compared to lions and hyenas.

They often roam around where there are hardly any other predators, but also few potential prey animals.

Fewer than seven thousand adult cheetahs live widely scattered in Africa's savannas and semi-deserts, and the trend is falling.

The "International Union for Conservation of Nature" (IUCN) lists this cat species as endangered.

In Asia, the cheetah is already extinct, with the exception of a small population in Iran.

Since this subspecies called

is estimated to have fewer than a hundred animals, it is considered a "Critically Endangered" species.