![]() ![]() A house cat this size could run up to 46 miles per hour a giant spider, if its legs could somehow sustain its weight, would top out at 35 miles per hour. Günther’s team was also able to predict theoretical speed maximums for different body designs at 100 kilograms, or about 220 pounds. Not coincidentally, that’s the average weight of both cheetahs and pronghorns. ![]() So smaller bodies have the advantage here.Īccording to the team’s results, the sweet spot for overcoming air drag and inertia lies at around 110 pounds. This is especially limiting for larger animals-with more mass to push forward, it's harder to overcome inertia. When running, Rockenfeller says, there is a time limit for an animal to accelerate its own mass: It’s the duration between midstance, when the foot is flat on the ground, to liftoff, when the foot leaves the ground. The second property at play, which does increase with greater mass, is called inertia, the resistance of an object to accelerate from a state of rest. “If you were infinitely heavy, you would run infinitely fast, according to air drag,” Rockenfeller says. ![]() Since the effects of drag don’t increase with mass, it’s the dominating factor capping speed in smaller animals. The first is air resistance, or drag, the opposing force acting on each leg as it tries to push the body forward. “The basic idea is that two things limit maximum speed,” says Robert Rockenfeller, a mathematician at the University of Koblenz-Landau who coauthored the study. ![]()
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