What's it like to be an animal?
October 10, 2015 2:17 PM   Subscribe

The Speed of Animals. If you're six feet tall, 10 miles per hour probably doesn't feel very fast. But what if you were just six inches tall, like a squirrel? It would feel quite a bit faster. This site shows the actual speeds of animals and how fast they would be going if they were your size.
posted by Bistle (46 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
So Speedy wasn't really running at 161 mph, it just felt that way to him?
posted by Garm at 2:21 PM on October 10, 2015


Domestic cat for the win!

Wait, mice? Rabbits? Goddamned lizards?

Good thing there's still guile in the old tool chest.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:21 PM on October 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


Horseflies, wtf!
posted by Braeburn at 2:29 PM on October 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


Domestic cat for the win!

Haha, I know. It was a particularly chaotic housecat elevenses that led to me searching for this kind of info in the first place.
posted by Bistle at 2:32 PM on October 10, 2015 [3 favorites]


Does it factor in their wind resistance? Giraffes just look like they are fighting against a stiff wind anyway. Wondering how they fare when strong winds kick up?
posted by TenaciousB at 2:32 PM on October 10, 2015


Also, why didn't Wile E. Coyote do better than the Road Runner -- he should win on speed and guile (although, not, perhaps, on quality assurance from his provisioners).
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:35 PM on October 10, 2015 [5 favorites]


OOH! OOH! Do my chihuahua! :

Size: 6lbs,
Top Speed: Wait, where'd she go?
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 2:36 PM on October 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


They have left the peregrine falcon out of the birds chart. I feel this is unconscionable.

Also, apparently blue whales live a life of frustration, only slightly better than snails.
posted by tavella at 2:56 PM on October 10, 2015


Okay physics nerds, let's do this:

I assume they're scaling it linearly in animal height/length, and that's probably right, because "length" appears in "speed" with an exponent of 1. But are they right to assume "seconds" doesn't need to be re-interpreted as well? After all, they want to know how it "feels", and I've always assumed a hummingbird experiences more in one second than I do. Is "heartbeats" the right way to scale that?
posted by benito.strauss at 3:01 PM on October 10, 2015 [9 favorites]


This doesn't any sense in terms of physics or perception as far as I can tell. But they have definitely multiplied some numbers, and made a chart.
posted by Wolfdog at 3:02 PM on October 10, 2015 [33 favorites]


Wait, what? How are they calculating this? Dividing distance by height or body length or something similar? Why on earth would that be the right thing to do?

If anything, I'd expect that time perception probably scales with linear brain size, or perhaps the reaction time for nerves traveling through the body. Even heartbeats would be seem a more likely guess than this.
posted by eotvos at 3:03 PM on October 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


eotvos: "If anything, I'd expect that time perception probably scales with linear brain size, or perhaps the reaction time for nerves traveling through the body. Even heartbeats would be seem a more likely guess than this."

My perception of how fast I am moving depends on what am looking at whilst I move. If I am in a car and look at a row of regularly spaced objects (such the legs of motorway crash barriers, or lampposts), they seem to be going past faster if they are closer, presumably because the angular rate of change is larger.

This makes me think that properties of the eye, such as field of view and/or angular resolution should be important, as should environment: for a mouse, the closest object is very close; for a bird of prey flying high it is much further away.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 3:25 PM on October 10, 2015 [3 favorites]


I want to see it all in heartbeats per furlong, thanks.
posted by idiopath at 3:25 PM on October 10, 2015 [4 favorites]


"Wile E." is just the coyote's given name, probably his parents just HOPING he'd grow up smart. He historically lacked 'guile'. (Including his tendency to single-source for supplies)
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:32 PM on October 10, 2015


So Squirrel Girl's "proportional speed of a squirrel" works out to almost 80 miles an hour. Too bad they didn't include any known 'bugs' in the chart; I would have like to see how Spider-Man would've compared.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:36 PM on October 10, 2015


Also, why didn't Wile E. Coyote do better than the Road Runner -- he should win on speed and guile (although, not, perhaps, on quality assurance from his provisioners).


One also has to calculate for hubris.
posted by louche mustachio at 3:57 PM on October 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


Being farther off the ground definitely makes it feel like you are moving slower. A tall SUV feels much slower than a low sedan at the same speed, and in a plane it feels like you are creeping along even though you are going 500 mph.
posted by insoluble uncertainty at 4:11 PM on October 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think they've realised that scaling up/down the animals wouldn't work, because of the inverse square law and concomitant issues...so they've tried to sidestep it and stepped right into something else that makes no sense and is hard to clean off.
posted by howfar at 4:33 PM on October 10, 2015 [3 favorites]


The fact that moths feel like they're going 1240 mph makes a lot of sense in terms of why they can't seem to accurately control what direction they're headed in.
posted by gloriouslyincandescent at 5:26 PM on October 10, 2015 [4 favorites]


Today I learned: the scientific name for the roadrunner means "Californian earthbutt."
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:04 PM on October 10, 2015


Bears are frighteningly fast. People that feed them are taking an even bigger risk than I realized.
posted by tommasz at 6:23 PM on October 10, 2015


This doesn't any sense in terms of physics or perception as far as I can tell. But they have definitely multiplied some numbers, and made a chart.

It makes some sense, in that if an animal was scaled up or down and the proportions stayed the same then a single stride would be longer or shorter and the animal would be moving faster or slower.

Couching it in terms of how the animal feels, however, is strange. Not sure where that enters into it.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 6:24 PM on October 10, 2015


holy fuck that snake is SO FAST. how is it physically possible to slither at 20 miles per hour.
posted by cj_ at 6:49 PM on October 10, 2015


Gee if I was one of the animals that got normalized downwards this would just make me feel bad.
posted by Joe Chip at 7:33 PM on October 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


... in a plane it feels like you are creeping along even though you are going 500 mph

Off-topic, but I find that if you "lock your eyes" in a single position, you will be able to "visually witness" what 500 mph feels like.
I like to use the edge of the window as a point of reference, lock my eyes and look down without looking at the rest of the view. You'll see the road and houses and trees zip by like you've never seen before!
posted by bitteroldman at 7:41 PM on October 10, 2015 [3 favorites]


Today I learned: the scientific name for the roadrunner means "Californian earthbutt."

Holy shit wait no it's even weirder. "Coccyx" in Greek meant "cuckoo," and got applied as a name for the tailbone later for some weird reason.
The 16th/17th century French anatomist Jean Riolan the Younger gives a rather hilarious etymological explanation, as he writes: quia crepitus, qui per sedimentum exeunt, ad is os allisi, cuculi vocis similitudinem effingunt (because the sound of the farts that leave the anus and dash against this bone, shows a likeness to the call of the cuckoo). The latter is not considered as potential candidate.
So it's the Californian earth-cuckoo and not the Californian earthbutt after all. Pity.
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:47 PM on October 10, 2015 [3 favorites]


Is "heartbeats" the right way to scale that?

That's how you normalise lifespan (in mammals, at least). I think here, where they're making comparisons to insects, you need to normalise according to the distance the nerve impulses travel between the eyes and the brain.
posted by kisch mokusch at 12:14 AM on October 11, 2015 [1 favorite]


Also, why didn't Wile E. Coyote do better than the Road Runner

The Roadrunner wins by Proccyx.
posted by Namlit at 12:23 AM on October 11, 2015


if an animal was scaled up or down and the proportions stayed the same then a single stride would be longer or shorter and the animal would be moving faster or slower.

What my comment above is addressing is that this isn't actually true, because gravity doesn't work that way. Hence the reason for bringing perception into it. Which doesn't work that way either.
posted by howfar at 2:07 AM on October 11, 2015 [1 favorite]


Its a bit like "dog years" - a totally meaningless calculation that pretends to allow some sort of meaningful comparison. Total nonsense.
posted by mary8nne at 2:16 AM on October 11, 2015


mary8nne: "Its a bit like "dog years" - a totally meaningless calculation that pretends to allow some sort of meaningful comparison. Total nonsense."

It's not total nonsense. If you were one cm long and could run 500 of your body lengths in a second, that would feel really fucking fast, though in reality it would be 5 meters per second. If you were 1km long and could only move 1/200 of your body length in a second, that would feel incredibly show, though in reality it would be the same 5 meters per second.

Translating things into equivalent km/h isn't the best idea, and using the expression "feels like" is catnip for sites that specialize in nitpicking, like MeFi, so it isn't perfect, by any means, but it's far from "total nonsense". Translating things into "body lengths/second" or the like would produce the same graphs and rankings and rile pedants up less, though.
posted by Bugbread at 3:27 AM on October 11, 2015 [4 favorites]


Except is body length really the key to perception? A snake is longer than a giraffe but a giraffe's head is further from the ground and a bird much smaller than either but it is way up in the sky and anyway you didn't say whether you mean an African or European swallow.

I think "total nonsense" is a perfectly reasonable description. This tells us nothing usefully comparable about what it would feel like to be any of these animals in motion, or what it would feel like if we were the same length as these animals when in motion. Translating it to body lengths would just reveal that the data are completely unilluminating.
posted by howfar at 4:12 AM on October 11, 2015 [1 favorite]


So it's the Californian earth-cuckoo and not the Californian earthbutt after all. Pity.

Not a pity! Now I have a new funny name for my coccyx! I can impress my niece who is at an age where funny names for butt are worth gold - I can't wait to lay "cuckoo" on her.
posted by bluefly at 6:06 AM on October 11, 2015


howfar: "Translating it to body lengths would just reveal that the data are completely unilluminating."

Really? As a kid, I would watch ants scurry around and think "Shit, they are FAST!"
Sure, they were nowhere near as fast as a cheetah. Or even me. I could stroll faster than the fastest ant there is. But they'd run like 20 of their body lengths in the amount of time it would take me to run four feet. And I would wonder how fast it would look if it were on the same scale as me, or if I were on the same scale as the ants.
So a big table that shows comparisons of different animal speeds in terms of what they would be when translated to human size is really interesting to me. It shows how much of a gulf there is between certain animals, and how big or little the differences are between animals which I couldn't figure out off the top of my head. In other words, it illuminates things for me.

Sure, if it then translated things into heartbeats and nerve signal transmission times, that would be even more illuminative. But that's like reading an interesting 10 page article and saying "Not a 300 page book with extensive footnotes. Therefore, tells us absolutely nothing."

Or, I guess, you're just smarter than me, and you already knew all this stuff. In which case, well, congratulations on being really smart. Good job.
posted by Bugbread at 6:29 AM on October 11, 2015 [2 favorites]


I would wonder how fast it would look if it were on the same scale as me, or if I were on the same scale as the ants.

But here's the problem from my perspective, which my questions above were intended to illustrate: "scale" isn't a simple thing. Why does it make sense to pick body-length? Does a centipede perceive movement as slower than an ant? Even if its eyes and legs and all that are the same size, with just more trailing behind? What particular measuments should we apply to convert my dimensions to the dimensions of each beast? In my view, we don't know.

In all honesty, I don't really see how we can intelligibly make any determination of scale without reference to notions of convention and measurement. The thing is, in order for the data as presented to be genuinely illuminating, rather than providing a false sense of insight, we'd need to have a definition of scale that goes beyond the conventional. We don't have that, as far as I can see. I am roughly twice as long as I was when I was 5 years old, but my perception of speed has not halved, as far as I can tell. That's because I determine speed in relation to personal and shared conventions of size, distance, safety etc. Even if we could come up with a way to make the calculations necessary to scale me up or down physically, how those conventions would apply if you were to change my body size is not something that I think we know. We just seem to keep running up against questions that need answers.

This is not, in my view, the equivalent of an accurate ten page article. Rather, I think it assumes the very thing that an accurate article would need to explain, and gives a false sense of insight on the basis of that.

Saying that is not intended to insinuate that I'm smarter than you. It's just what I think.
posted by howfar at 7:30 AM on October 11, 2015


Oh my god. This gets awfully close to my very longstanding sloth relativity question!

Which is- to a sloth, it's super slow movements are normal. So, if you pick up a sloth and walk with it does it think it's travelling in like, warp speed?
posted by KernalM at 7:49 AM on October 11, 2015 [4 favorites]


The deer botfly (once reported incorrectly as achieving 818 mph; debunked in the 1930s; article from Pittsburgh Press, 1938) would have clocked in at 147,000 scale miles per hour.

The nonsense 818 mph figure still persisted into various books and articles when I was a kid. It wasn't some entomologist with a radar gun. But it was an entomologist, standing atop a mountain in New Mexico, witnessing botflies whizzing past at very high speeds. "As closely as I can estimate," said the doctor, "their speed must have approximated 400 yards per second."

That very round, baseless number, when converted to mph (and significant figures be damned) becomes 818.

Even better: the female botfly was reported not as fast, only 614 mph.
posted by kurumi at 9:17 AM on October 11, 2015 [3 favorites]


So, if you pick up a sloth and walk with it does it think it's travelling in like, warp speed?

If their mental processing is as slow as their movement, then it probably wouldn't register. Each time it blinked, it would open it's eyes to a new location. Would probably feel more like a dream.

There are people who study the perception of time, which is critical in understanding how fast travel "feels". I remember a documentary that showed life from the perspective of a housefly. Because it could register many more moments per second than a human, humans looked to be slow, lumbering beasts.
posted by kisch mokusch at 1:47 PM on October 11, 2015


If their mental processing is as slow as their movement

Sloths are somewhat maligned. They are apparently capable of very quick and precise movement when they feel like it, which is not all that often. Gerald Durrell, in one of his books (Three Tickets to Adventure, I think) has a terrifying and hilarious story about a deadly fight with an escaped sloth (complicated by a bunch of poisonous snakes and an overly-friendly chicken), which, although played up for effect, has the sloth lashing out with considerable speed and force. That it's evolved for dangling and slow foraging does not make the species helpless; they would have died out long ago if that were the case. Sloths just have kind of bad PR.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:53 PM on October 11, 2015 [3 favorites]


Gerald Durrell ... has a terrifying and hilarious story about a deadly fight with an escaped sloth

Well yeah, who doesn't.
posted by Wolfdog at 3:03 PM on October 11, 2015 [1 favorite]


howfar: "Why does it make sense to pick body-length? Does a centipede perceive movement as slower than an ant?"

Basically, I think you're caught up on this being a table of how fast things feel. And I agree, it's not. That's poor copy on the site. But the actual content of the site, beyond three of the four sentences on the front page, is interesting. If a novel says on the jacket that it is a great sci-fi novel, but it turns out the jacket is all wrong and its actually a great historical novel, it's still a good novel, it just has a misleading jacket.
posted by Bugbread at 4:14 PM on October 11, 2015


I think an essential part of the "feeling" of speed involves inertia - how much effort it takes to accelerate, turn, and stop. So the square-cube law is going to mess this up quite a bit.

A squirrel has less mass and less absolute velocity, so it can turn, stop, and accelerate much more abruptly than I could at a linearly-scaled equivalent speed.

The whole proportionate-strength of a spider thing is completely backwards. Spiders aren't built to handle weight at human-sized scales. A me-sized spider probably wouldn't be strong enough to walk, much less pick up a car.
posted by straight at 4:34 PM on October 11, 2015 [1 favorite]


But the actual content of the site, beyond three of the four sentences on the front page, is interesting.

I was trying to work out how I'd present these data in a way to make them illuminating to me. The best I could come up with was "this is how fast it would look like these creatures are going, if you were on the same scale as them". But then I realised that my centipede/ant question would still be problematic. What scale would you pick and why? I ultimately don't get how I can usefully parse the information I'm given by this site.

I don't wish to be overly critical of the site. I think this is a general problem with conversion, like trying to answer how much £1 was worth in 1900. The necessary preface to any answer is "it depends on the context". Picking one metric and sticking by it for everything from wages to houses (or insects to elephants) is, in my view, misleading. It's interesting to think about the problems of context and specificity in relation to something with limited social context.
posted by howfar at 1:22 PM on October 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


Not one single predator on Earth has ever thought, "Gee, for his size, my lunch is TOTALLY outrunning me in body-lengths!"

For that matter, it doesn't seem faster to them, either. Their eyes can potentially take frames faster than the distance from retina to neural-optical-center will allow; this in fact means tiny animals can see things at a higher effective frame-rate, which roughly (very roughly) scales to body length. This, coupled with retina-level processing (rejection of motionless images, for instance), allows a fly to see many "frames" of the flyswatter approaching, while the human operating it only sees one blurred frame.

Ergo, this is meaningless.
posted by IAmBroom at 1:59 PM on October 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Not one single predator on Earth has ever thought, "Gee, for his size, my lunch is TOTALLY outrunning me in body-lengths!"

Well you just thought this, and you're probably a pretty good predator.

I see this as a kind of parallel dimension thought experiment. Yes, you can't stuff a person into a spider sack. But what if you could!
posted by Bistle at 10:05 PM on October 15, 2015


Not one single predator on Earth has ever thought, "Gee, for his size, my lunch is TOTALLY outrunning me in body-lengths!"

Well, my lunch sure never does.
posted by Namlit at 6:59 AM on October 16, 2015


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