World's fastest animal is...

[Moonstone Spider]

Certain (Possibly discredited) studies have suggested speeds for the Deer Bot Fly of 450-800mph.

These studies have been attacked and "debunked" particularly by chemists over food consumption to maintain that speed several times, however I can't help but remember that similar debunkings once proved that bumblebees cannot fly at all. . . because the scientists doing the debunking simply didn't comprehend the special ability of the creatures involved. Thus while I would never swear to that kind of speed I personally wouldn't rule it out as the fastest creature on the planet.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Now the real king of flying speeds for RL are swallows.

The Bird Almanac (ISBN: 1-55297-925-3 ) gives the following

fastest-moving bird: diving peregrine falcon at 188 km/h (117 mph)

fastest flapping flight: white-throated needle-tailed swift at 170 km/h (106 mph)

fastest level-flight: red-breasted merganser at 161 km/h (100 mph)

I'm not sure how they distinguish between flapping flight and level-flight though!

Cheers

 

[Plane Sailing]

Certain (Possibly discredited) studies have suggested speeds for the Deer Bot Fly of 450-800mph.

These studies have been attacked and "debunked" particularly by chemists over food consumption to maintain that speed several times, however I can't help but remember that similar debunkings once proved that bumblebees cannot fly at all. . . because the scientists doing the debunking simply didn't comprehend the special ability of the creatures involved. Thus while I would never swear to that kind of speed I personally wouldn't rule it out as the fastest creature on the planet.

I'd not heard about this before, so I thought I'd check it up. This is the most complete account that I found

The botfly story began back in 1927, when the entomologist, Charles H. T. Townsend published an article in the Journal of the New York Entomological Society. Right at the end of his article, he included this very interesting paragraph:

"On 12,000-foot summits in New Mexico I have seen pass me at an incredible velocity what were quite certainly the males of (the deer botfly). I could barely distinguish that something had passed, only a brownish blur in the air of about the right size for these flies and without sense of form. As closely as I can estimate, their speed must have approximated 400 yards per second [800 miles per hour]."- (actually closer to 818 mph)

In 1938, Irving Langmuir, an American chemist and Nobel Prize winner, demolished this astounding claim.

First, at 1,287 kph the air pressure against the head of the fly would have been about half an atmosphere, which would have been enough to crush the poor little fly. Second, the energy needed to fly at that speed meant the deer botfly would have to eat one-and-a-half times its own weight in food every second! Third, at what speed does a flying insect turn into a blur? Langmuir just got a lump of metal the size of a deer botfly, tied it to a thread and swung it around. At 20 kph, it was a blur - "the shape could not be seen, but it could be recognised as a small object of about the correct size". At 41 kph, "the fly was barely visible as a moving object". So Townsend probably saw deer botflys cruising at around 40 kays, which is a lot less than 1,287 kph.

Also, you would get an extremely nasty injury from a supersonic botfly running into you - but there are none on record. The fastest insect on record, that has been reliably measured, is the Australian dragon fly - which has a top speed of around 57 kph.

So the original figure came from a foolish estimate by someone who didn't really think through what they were saying.

As another writer puts it, the 800kph deer botfly would be making sonic booms and if one run into you it would be like being shot!

 

[FireLance]

As another writer puts it, the 800kph deer botfly would be making sonic booms and if one run into you it would be like being shot!

You've just given me an idea for a Fine magical beast - the Sonic Boomfly.

 

[Plane Sailing]

You've just given me an idea for a Fine magical beast - the Sonic Boomfly.

There was a sci-fi writer many years ago who had a series of novels, and I'm sure that in one of those there was an 'assassin bug' which involved supersonic males attempting to mate with females which the assassin would plant on his target...

 

[RonYon]

Awaken? No no no, slay it, Animate Dead it, then Awaken it.
Now add levels in Monk and Barbarian, etc.
The undead can run, and hey never tire.Never.
Best/cheapest way to travel.
I like a palaquin,carried by 4 large humen shaped ,flying outsider, undead.
Big enough to sleep in, all terrain, base it off an up scaled familier carrier, and you can even seal it off from the outside air/water...


Boy that went of topic fast.
Sorry, but I gots Undead on the brains.

 

[awayfarer]

Now that I come to look at it, I wonder why we don't see more cheetahs at lower levels. You could really mess with a party using them.

Or even better, use the cheetahs stats/abilities but describe it as something different
EX: A dwarf-sized, greyish-green skinned humanoid stands in front of you. Its face has no features apart from a small hole that you can only assume is its mouth.

Round 1
PC: Yikes! I run
DM: Okay. It stands there and watches you go.

Round 2
PC: I keep running
DM: It's stil just standing there.

Round 3:
PC: I stop to see what it's doing.
DM: In a barel;y perceptible blur of movement it is standing in front of you. The mouth-hole widens until it envelops nearly the entire head, revealing row after rwo if sharp teeth. It bites!

 

[Storyteller01]

never mind...

 

[Moonstone Spider]

I'd not heard about this before, so I thought I'd check it up. This is the most complete account that I found

So the original figure came from a foolish estimate by someone who didn't really think through what they were saying.

As another writer puts it, the 800kph deer botfly would be making sonic booms and if one run into you it would be like being shot!

I know of three other bot-fly speed experiments although I can't seem to Google-Fu up any references, two wind-tunnel tests provided results of 450 and 650MPH, and a doppler radar test gave a speed of 90mph.

I did hem and haw and provide a bunch of disclaimers on that figure (I consider Townsend's result highly unlikely, but a speed of 200-300mph wouldn't surprise me), but to my mind Langmuir's results are much more suspect than Townsend, his methods and conclusions have more results than swiss cheese. Langmuir's casual dismissal to me represents the worst sort of dismissive science, where anything observed that doesn't fit the scientist's worldview is simply dismissed as wrong, particularly since Townsend was an extremely respected entomolygist who is responsible for the discovery and analysis of dozens of species over many decades.

Of Note:
His conclusions on food intake rely on huge assumptions about the Bot Fly's biochemistry and aerodynamics. Remember that this is the same era that produced "Proof" that it is impossible to throw a curve ball (Scientists claimed it was an optical illusion and many bitterly clung to that view even when baseball players were observe to be able to throw around a board as much as 18 inches wide) and "proof" that a bumblebee cannot actually fly, all based on faulty knowledge of aerodynamics. The same objection applies to his claim that the bot fly would squish from air pressure.

His sonic boom claim depends on the insect generating a reasonable amount of noise, flying in a straight line, and travelling at close to the speed of sound for a lengthy period of time. Obviously that's a heck of a lot of assumptions for a physicist to be making since anybody who's seen insects in flight realizes they rarely do any one of those, much less all three for a long period. His assumptions about flies running into people assumes that these flies apparently cant' see where they're going, and routinely interact with people (In fact the observed speed was very high up on a mountain peak where humans wouldn't rarely be found, and where air pressure was much lower).

Worst of all, his "Lead Weight" experiment is pure idiocy. He assumes first that Townsend observed the botfly at exactly the same distance away as the length of his string. The odds of this are probably less than the odds that Townsend developed psychic powers to observe the botfly. At merely twice as far away (Say, four feet instead of two) the fly would have to be moving four times faster for the same blur effect.

Worst of all, Langmuir's lead weight experiment assumes that his eyesight and Townsend's are exactly equal. Townsend's profession is built around observing tiny fast moving insects. Langmuir's is built around looking at a chalkboard and doing math. The notion that Langmuir could confidently claim that his "Spot Check" is the same as Townsend's is laughable.

In conclusion while I think Townsend's observations were probably in error, I find his results more trustworthy than Langmuir's and certainly wouldn't suggest that Townsend was simply being foolish or failing to take basic precautions of his observation.

 

[lukelightning]

Remember that this is the same era that produced "Proof" that it is impossible to throw a curve ball

Well, now-a-days many people persist in believing that the moon is larger closer to the horizon than it is higher up, which has been consistantly proven to be an optical illusion (some ancient Greek philosopher debunked that but the myth persists).