To kill, cheetahs use agility and acceleration, not top speed

Flickr user Taraji Blue

Researchers have used gadget-laden collars to record cheetahs' movements in the wild. They found that cheetahs succeed not because they are the fastest animal on land but because of their incredible acceleration and unmatched turning speeds.

Most of what we know about cheetahs in the wild is based on direct observation or through videos from remote cameras. This limits our understanding of cheetahs to open habitats and daytime. Alan Wilson at the University of London’s Royal Veterinary College wanted to study cheetahs better.

Over the past ten years, Wilson and his team have been perfecting devices to study the locomotion of animals. For cheetahs, they assembled a collar that carries a GPS device to record location data, an accelerometer to measure speed, a gyroscope to understand angular motion, and a magnetometer to make location data more accurate, which it does by measuring tiny changes in Earth’s magnetic field. The data was transmitted back to the researchers in real time through radio.