Now that the Paris Olympics and Paralympics have disappeared from our screens, let’s get back to watching animal videos.

But seriously, have you ever paused to think about the athletic abilities of Australian wildlife?

In my research as an ecologist, I’m constantly amazed by the strength, speed and resilience of our native animals. Their prowess is testament to the wonders of evolution, and the necessity of species having to adapt to challenging and changing environments in order to survive.

Let’s take a closer look at some of our best competitors and how might they fare, against humans and overseas entrants. On your marks, get set… swim, hop, dig, dance, glide!

Swimming

Australians are renowned for being strong swimmers. But what is the fastest swimmer in the animal kingdom?

On this there is much debate. Some suggest it’s the Indo Pacific sailfish, clocking in at about 30km/hr. That’s impressive, but much slower than oft-cited (but inaccurate) claims it can travel at more than 100km/hr.

For perspective, the fastest human to swim the 50 meters freestyle is American Caeleb Dressel, completing this in a time of 20.16 seconds. That’s roughly 9km/h—faster than many people jog, but still no match for a sailfish.

As in humans, swimming speed in fishes tends to increase with body length. Larger species that challenge sailfish for the fastest swimmer title include blue or black marlin. Shorter, torpedo-like bluefin tuna are also in contention. All are found in Australian waters, though not exclusively.

Sprinting, long and high jump

Aussie icons, red kangaroos can reach speeds of around 60-70km/hr. But they are no match for cheetahs, which can move at more than 120km/hr.

Long jump is surely the kangaroo’s main event. Red kangaroos can jump a staggering 13 meters or more. Amazingly, this might not be enough to clinch gold. Snow leopards can jump more than 15 meters.

Kangaroos can clear heights of up to 3m, so would perform well in the high jump. But they’d finish behind bottlenose dolphins, which can jump over 7m in the air, just for kicks.

Scaled for body size, though, both species would be embarrassed by a tiny insect known as a froghopper. It jumps to heights of more than 140 times its body length.

Battles of strength

African elephants can lift more than 1,000kg and weaver ants more than 100 times their own body weight.

But relative to size, a truly impressive champion is Australia’s horned dung beetle. At just a centimeter long, these diminutive powerhouses can pull more than 1,100 times their own body weight, roughly equating to an average man lifting two fully-loaded 18-wheeler trucks.

And yet, horned dung beetles might still only claim silver. Another invertebrate Aussie, the tiny tropical moss mite, is perhaps the world’s strongest animal. It can pull more than 1,180 times its weight.

Packing the fastest, deadliest punch

In terms of combat sports, bigger is not always better.

Peacock mantis shrimps—invertebrates found in Australian marine waters and elsewhere—have the swiftest and most powerful punch in the lightweight crustacean division.

They kill prey by punching them with strong, club-like appendages. They deliver blows at up to 23m per sec, akin to the speed and force of a .22 caliber bullet being fired.

So powerful is the punch, it vaporizes water and creates a super-hot shockwave that breaks up and incapacitates its prey.

Tantalizing contests

What about a digging contest? Eastern barred bandicoots can shift 4.8 tons of soil a year. How would that stack up against marsupial moles, which can disappear almost instantly into desert sands? Or the expert excavations of wombats and aardvarks that can dig more than half a meter in 15 seconds?

In terms of free-diving and flying, there’s really no contest. Cuvier’s beaked whale can dive nearly 3000m and peregrine falcons can reach over 320 km/hr. These animals are found across the globe, however—not just in Australia.

Australia’s largest gliding marsupial, the greater glider, can sail up to 100m between trees. But gliding gold would surely go to the giant flying squirrel, which can glide up to 450m.

I’d love to see a shooting contest between Australia’s archer fish and Madagascar’s panther chameleon. But finding the right arena for both aquatic and land-based sharpshooters would be tricky.

Raygun’s kangaroo hop is now legendary, but a breaking (break dancing) contest between a peacock spider, spanish dancer (a type of nudibranch) and a magnificent riflebird might genuinely break the internet.

Appreciating wildlife athletes

So who would win a global contest for the best wildlife athlete overall?

If the competition was on land and focused on running, jumping, strength and climbing, it’s hard to go past the overall abilities of a Bengal tiger.

Many amazing wildlife athletes are threatened with extinction. Others are gone forever.

They include the incredible oolacunta—also known as the desert rat kangaroo. It’s powers of endurance in the desert are the stuff of folklore. As legendary Australian mammalogist Hedley Herbert Finlayson wrote in 1931:

“Its speed for such an atom, was wonderful, and its endurance amazing … when we finally got it, it had taken the starch out of three mounts and run us 12 miles; all under such adverse conditions of heat and rough going, as to make it almost incredible that so small a frame should be capable of such an immense output of energy.”

Let’s celebrate wildlife and their athletic abilities and ensure they have a secure future.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Knowing how animals use their environments to survive and thrive is a key challenge for predicting how global climate change will affect wildlife. A global collaborative study of four species of crane has shed light on the way that migrations are finely tuned to unpredictable and complex environments.

A team from 10 countries combined novel animal tracking technology, remote-sensed information about the environment, and a new statistical framework to gain insight into four iconic species: common cranes, white-naped cranes, black-necked cranes, and demoiselle cranes.

The study, led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and Yale University, was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on September 23.

The researchers used tiny GPS tracking devices to follow the movements of 104 cranes in Africa, Asia, and Europe. These devices included unique solar-powered GPS leg bands developed by scientists from MPI-AB. The tracking data revealed the impressive migrations that cranes undertook.

Some of the migratory routes exceeded 6,400 km of travel round trip and required crossing barriers such as the Alps or Himalaya mountain ranges, the deserts of the Arabian peninsula, or the Mediterranean Sea.

In addition to the tracking study, the researchers also developed a statistical framework that revealed how the cranes’ movements relate to aspects of the environment, such as the presence of crops or water bodies nearby, and the temperature and vegetation cover on the land.

“Animals have to satisfy their own needs with what they can get from their environment, but both of these are changing constantly,” says Scott Yanco, first author on the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan.

“This creates an intriguing optimization problem that we wanted to know if cranes were solving through long-distance migration.”

The researchers found that all four crane species experienced starkly different environmental conditions over a year, and that these periods were synchronized with important events in their lives. This was particularly pronounced when comparing temperatures or resource availability on wintering and summer breeding grounds.

For some, the migrations themselves entailed huge shifts in environmental conditions. For example, the demoiselle cranes migrated across the Tibetan plateau and had to contend with massive fluctuations in temperature while doing so.

“We suspect this all has to do with different biological needs during these different times of the year,” adds Yanco, who did the research when he was at the Yale Center for Biodiversity and Global Change. For example, common cranes clearly emphasized agricultural areas during the late summer, a period that aligns with raising juveniles and preparing for fall migration.

“This is exactly when we would expect them to want easy access to food,” he says.

For other species, access to food may come at a cost. The black-necked cranes in the study had to decide between safe roosting habitat and abundant resources.

“Amazingly, the balance between these competing needs changed over the year depending on what the birds were doing,” adds Yanco. During migration they opted for safer roosting conditions, whereas during breeding they leaned towards abundant food.

“This type of shifting emphasis depending on what cranes need at any given time is what we were expecting to see,” says Ivan Pokrovsky, a postdoctoral researcher at MPI-AB and last author on the study.

“But we were blown away by how well the cranes used movement to resolve trade-offs among competing needs and to access certain environments during key periods of the year.”

Understanding how animals interact with their surroundings not only gives us a more nuanced view of how they survive in complex environments—it is crucial for developing policy and management actions to address the dual crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, the authors say.

The study’s framework offers a statistical tool for understanding the complicated relationships between animals and their environments that can be widely applied to conservation and management efforts of wildlife.

“When we know how animals use certain environmental conditions, we can make better predictions about how species might respond to human-caused global change and develop more effective interventions that ensure we preserve the conditions species need to survive,” says Pokrovsky.