A Cheetah Can Get You Without Hitting Top Speed

speed, it seems, isn't everything. Cheetahs may be the world's fastest sprinters, but it is their blinding accelerationfaster than a Lamborghini'sand their phenomenal athleticism, rather than their famous top speed of over 60 miles per hour (96.5 kilometers per hour), that is the true key to their hunting success in the wild, according to the results of a ground-breaking, high-tech study into the biomechanics of wild cheetahs published this week in Nature magazine. "Pound for pound a cheetah's acceleration power is about four times that of Usain Bolt during his worldrecord 100 meters," says Alan Wilson, professor of locomotor biomechanics at London's Royal Veterinary College, who led the study. "And what's more, a cheetah can still accelerate like that even when it is already doing 40 mph, then decelerate nearly as swiftly, turn hard, and sprint in another direction." Surprisingly, the cheetahs in the study group seldom hit their top gear. The fastest speed the group recorded was 58 mph (93 kph)well short of the anecdotal 70 mph (112.7 kph) often claimed for cheetahs in the wild. "I suspect that in more open areas like the Serengeti they may go a bit faster," says Wilson. "But most of the chases we recorded in Botswana involved relatively modest speeds. What we did record, however, [were] some of the highest values for acceleration, deceleration, and body-mass power [the amount of energy generation per kilogram] ever measured for any terrestrial animal." To put a cheetah's athleticism into perspective consider this: Usain Bolt churned out about 25 watts of energy per kilogram of body weight during the course of his 9.58-second 100-meter world-record sprint. Nature's other great sprinters, racehorses and greyhounds, generate 30 watts and 60 watts, respectively, but the wild cheetahs in the study went off the power-meter charts, generating 120 watts per kilogram of body weight. To obtain the data for the study the team attached tracking collars equipped with a global positioning system (GPS), accelerometers, and gyroscopes to five wild cheetahs in Botswana's Okavango Delta and monitored them closely over a period of 17 months. Whenever observers detected hunting-like behavior starting to take place, they activated the devices in that cheetah's collar and began collecting data. As the cheetah launched into its sprint, the collar would beam back information on the big cat's speed, its rate of acceleration, and its heart-stopping deceleration in the hairpin turns, as well as plotting every twist and doubling-back throughout the chase. The collar's GPS could plot the cheetah's course on a map, giving

scientists a precise route of each run, along with a continuous stream of speed and motion data. In all, 367 "hunting runs" were recorded. The stateof-the-art collars recorded everything from a cheetah's turning radius at speed, to the wattage produced by its muscles during acceleration, to the various forces applied to its body throughout the twisting, turning chase. Next year the group plans to raise the bar still further, using aircraft, aerial cameras, and remote-sensing technology to plot cheetahs' impala-chasing sprints on 3-D maps of the terrain. "What we are hoping to do next is get an idea of the cheetahs' understanding and use of the terrain when they stalk their prey and launch into their sprints," says Wilson.

In War to Save Elephants, Rangers Appeal for Aid

His name is Baghdad, because of the bullet scar in his ear. He lives in a national park in Gabon, and he's one of only 20 African forest elephants left on Earth whose tusks touch the ground, making him worth about a hundred thousand U.S. dollarsdead. "That's a sad reflection on our planet," Lee White, head of Gabon's national park system, said Sunday at a meeting of the World Conservation Congress in Jeju, South Korea, where conservationists are appealing for aid from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as African elephant populations plummet. With international crime syndicates coveting more and more elephant ivorya symbol of wealth in booming Asianumbers of the mammal have fallen to "crisis levels," according to a June report by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). The highest rate of elephant poaching since a global ivory ban in 1989 occurred in 2011, with tens of thousands of the animals slaughtered, their ivory shuttled out of West and, increasingly, East African seaports enroute mainly to China but also to other Asian consumer countries such as Thailand. About 472,000 to 690,000 African elephants currently classified as vulnerable by IUCNlikely roam the continent today, down from possibly five million in the 1930s and 1940s. On Wednesday, the IUCN Member Assembly will vote on three proposed motions to increase protection of African wildlife targeted for illegal killing, particularly elephants and rhinoceroses. One of the motions, sponsored by the Game Rangers Association of Africa, would lend aid to park rangers, some of whom are being killed by wellarmed poachers. Dozens of rangers have been killed this year in Africa, including 15 in the Kenya Wildlife Service alone.

"We're going into a phase now where we're basically at war," White said. "We're shifting from biologists being out in these parks to military people being out there." Enhancing Ranger Support At the conference, the rangers association's Tim Snow stood before a "Roll of Honour," a list of more than 60 rangers who have died this year around the world. There are many dead who go unreported. As "protectors of the protected," rangers need more funding, training, and equipmentparticularly as wildlife crime tightens its grip on Africa, said Snow, the main author of the ranger-led motion. Many African rangers are underpaid, living in ramshackle conditions in dangerous areas, Snow said. "It's not a ranger who's doing a normal patrol the rangers are in a war zone," he said. "We need government protection." The ranger motion is provocative because it's "the voice of the people from the frontlines," Matt Lewis, senior program officer for African Species Conservation at World Wildlife Fund, said in a phone interview. They're saying, "In order for us to effectively do our jobs, we need this." WWF recently launched a campaign to stop wildlife crime, and one of its main goals is raising the profile of rangers, since many "don't receive the support and training they need," Lewis said. He also backs the idea of standardizing rangers' work. For instance, a large institution such as the World Bank or the Global Environment Fund could fund a ranger training school or certification program. Indeed, the ranger motion calls for IUCN to "promote adequate funding, leadership, training and equipment for custodians of wildlife resources, and appropriate remuneration to enable the professional execution of their protective functions." Gabon, a country that's taken a strong stance against the ivory trade, recently upped its national park staff from 100 to 500 and is in the process of adding a new military branch of 250, White said. Even so, poachers have become more brazen, shooting at cars carrying park staff. "Every day I go to work worrying about what I'm going to hear," he said. Recording Elephant Poaching Regardless of whether the motions pass, IUCN is working on stemming the rise in elephant poaching, according to a presentation by Diane Skinner, program officer for IUCN's African Elephant Specialist Group. She said IUCN has been "increasingly looking at the issue," and "expanding our concern" from Central Africaa traditional poaching hot spotto East and Southern Africa. For example, the group has been working to record the uptick in poaching rates for the African and

Asian Elephant Database, which draws from aerial surveys and on-the-ground reports, Skinner said. She also noted a "very worrying" new method of killing elephants: Putting out poison, which can harm other animals as well. Poachers are becoming more sophisticated in their strategies throughout Africain some places, they're equipped with helicopters to carry their loot away quickly. But not all of them get away with it. Not surprisingly, 2011 was also a record year for major ivory seizures, Skinner added14 busts worth 24,000 kilograms of ivory, according to data from TRAFFIC, a global wildlife-trade monitoring group. Enlisting Public Support Despite the elephant's rapid decline, many people simply don't know how bad it's getting, said George Wittemyer, science director for the nonprofit Save the Elephants. That's why his organization launched the website Elephants in Peril on Sunday at the World Conservation Congressto boost "public knowledge and understanding of how drastic this issue is," he said. Users can study maps showing the proportion of elephants illegally killed in the past year, as well as get information on what's driving the surge and how they can help. Governments and organizations are "making very significant efforts to stop the massacre ... but we cannot do it on our own," Gabon's White emphasized. "If we don't deal with it in the next five years, this species is going to be ecologically extinct," he said, referring to the forest elephants of Central Africa. If that happens, he said, "The African rain forest will be a different place."