Long Days' Journey into Day

Some birds live totally in daylight, following the midnight sun from season to season. Here's an example from Bernd Heinrich in Why We Run:

White-rumped sandpipers spend the summer and breed north of the Arctic Circle where it is daylight virtually around the clock. In the fall, they migrate east across the American continent to the northeastern shores. There, they fatten up before beginning their nonstop journey of 2,900 miles of at least three days and nights. They reach Suriname on the north coast of South America, where they fuel up again on food. 

White-rumped sandpiper

They then embark on the last leg of their trip, 2,200 miles overland across South America to the southern tip of the continent, Argentina. The total trip is more than 9,000 miles—nearly pole to pole. The birds live in continuous sunlight, leaving from the midnight sun in the Northern Hemisphere and arriving in continuous daylight in the Southern Hemisphere. So they experience most of their lives in daylight, experiencing nights only during their migration.

Cockroaches Faster Than Cheetahs?

American cockroach

Are cockroaches the fastest runners on earth? According to Bernd Heinrich in Why We Run, American cockroaches walk and run slowly by alternately raising three legs at a time and keeping the other three on the ground. When they really need to move fast, the roaches spread their wings, shift their body weight to the rear, and run on their hind legs. They become bipedal! They can sprint at about 50 body lengths per second. If measured in body lengths, that makes these cockroaches FOUR times faster than a cheetah! 

Velociraptor

Which brings us to the speed advantage of running on two legs versus four. The quadrupedal dinosaurs were slowpokes, or at least could only sprint; but the bipedal dinos, like the velociraptor, were speed demons. Some of their bipedal descendants, like the ostrich, can run at 43 mph for long distances. Some lizards, such as the crested water dragon, rear up on their back legs to rev up their running speed. And, thus, we two-legged humans can run faster than our four-legged ape ancestors. 

Which Animals Are Ultrarunners?

So which are the fastest land animals? And for how long can they run at top speed?


Here's some insight into the fastest runners, from the book Why We Run—A Natural History by Bernd Heinrich. Cheetahs are the fastest runners on earth—hitting top speeds of 70 to 75 mph. But they can do so for only about half a minute before they start to overheat and contend with lactic acid buildup. Pronghorn antelopes have been clocked at 61 mph, almost twice as fast as a racehorse, and not just in a short sprint. The pronghorn is reputed to be able to cover 7 miles in 10 minutes. It outruns its predators rather than hiding from them.

Pronghorns

Although pronghorns are superb runners for moderate distances of about 20 to 30 miles, there's no evidence that they are ultramarathon distance runners. They never have to run 30 miles nonstop from wolves. Wolves usually catch elk within about a mile or so at Yellowstone Park. If not, they give up. Wolves seldom pursue for more than two miles, according to the Yellowstone Wolf Recovery Project.

“Speed is meaningless unless the distance is specified,” writes Heinrich. Among humans, the maximum running speed is about 23 mph in a sprint, but drops off dramatically as distances increase.

Camels are not fast runners, with their top speed at about 10 mph. This pales in comparison to a champion racehorse such as Secretariat, whose speed averaged 37.5 mph in the 1.5 mile Belmont in 1973. But, in a one-day race between a camel and a horse over a 109-mile course, although the horse won by a hair, it died the next day and the camel kept going. So speed is relative and endurance counts for a lot.

Cats Cover Their Feces? Depends on Gender

I noticed that my male cat sometimes covers his feces in the litter box, but usually does not. The instinct to bury feces seems to be a gender-based trait in cats. Females bury their feces to protect their young from predators and parasites, whereas males are more likely to leave their poop exposed to mark territory. H. Ellen Whiteley, DVM, writes in her 2002 book Understanding and Training Your Cat or Kitten:

“In ancient days a mother cat protected herself and her offspring by burying feces, thus hiding their presence from predators and from rodents, their intended prey. This behavior also helped reduce the ingestion of parasite eggs spread through excrement. . . . in some cases, cats leave the fecal deposit exposed for other cats to see or smell. It’s another way of claiming territory, and males indulge in this kind of marking more often than females. I know of one cat family where the male cat uses the litter box but does not bury his feces. His female littermate follows him to the box, sits quietly nearby while he does his business and leaves the box, and then reaches over the side of the box with her paw to cover the feces with litter.”

Big Cats, House Cats, and Wild Dogs

I'm reading the book Do Cats Hear with Their Feet? by Jake Page. He says that there are some 36 species of cats, large and small. Biologists break up the cats into four groups or lineages—the Ocelot lineage, the Domestic Cat lineage, the Pantherine lineage (includes the cougar, cheetah, puma, and serval) and the Panthera lineage (includes lynxes and all other big cats).

Leopard

And "according to British paleontologist Alan Turner, structurally the domestic house cat 'can be seen as simply a scaled-down version of a lion or a leopard, and in evolutionary terms the larger cats may even be considered as scaled-up versions of something much like a domestic cat.' They all have relatively long limbs, a short gut for digesting only meat, feet with claws, scissorlike cheek teeth called carnassials for shearing off pieces of meat, and especially long, sharp canine teeth. They are extremely supple animals, and most of them can climb trees with ease.”

What is amazing to me is that even though they are classified as different species, many can breed with each other. Page writes: “There used to be an almost hard-and-fast, and practical, rule about the idea of species. It was simply that all members of a species can breed with each other but cannot successfully breed with members of another species and produce reproductively viable offspring. But for a long time now the wild dogs have messed this all up. Coyotes, wolves, and domestic dogs were all given their own binomial names, Canis lupus for wolves, Canis latrans for coyotes, and Canis familiaris for the domestic dog. But they can all successfully mate and produce viable offspring. . . .  And it is now the same with cats. Some rather intrusive people have mated lions and tigers and leopards in various combinations, producing ligers, tiglons, and leopons—and some combinations and particularly females have produced sexually viable offspring.”

  

Savannah Cat

Have you heard of the Savannah cat? It's the result of breeding a domestic cat with a serval (wild African cats larger than house cats, with black spots on a tawny coat, long-legged, with large ears). I wonder what other combinations could reproduce—at least theoretically.

Serval

Just the Beginning

Hello! I am starting this blog for people who share my fascination with animal behavior--and love animals. My plan is to read lots and lots of books and articles about animal behavior in a wide range of species (yes, some will cover cats and dogs too) and blog about the coolest facts and stories I come across, concentrating on information that is not widely known.

I have had and loved dogs my whole life, and always considered myself a "dog person." But as I reach the end of my 50s, my family now has a gorgeous and incredibly smart kitten, named Tux. I am spellbound watching him fetch little balls like a dog, drinking from the bathroom faucet like it's a water fountain, and making really strange sounds when he is excited. So I am reading a pile of books about cats. I hope to start sharing some of the amazing information I find soon!

Please bear with me as I start slowly.

Time to check on Tux,
Liz