Anyone who has watched a cheetah run down an antelope knows that these
cats are impressively fast. But it turns out that speed is not the
secret to their prodigious hunting skills: a novel study of how cheetahs
chase prey in the wild shows that it is their agility — their skill at
leaping sideways, changing directions abruptly and slowing down quickly —
that gives those antelope such bad odds.
SOURCE : http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/science/agility-not-speed-is-cheetahs-meal-ticket-study-says.html?_r=0
“Cheetahs don’t actually go very fast when they’re hunting,” said Alan
M. Wilson, a professor at the Royal Veterinary College at the University
of London who studied cheetahs in Botswana and published a paper
about them on Wednesday in the journal Nature. “The hunt is much more
about maneuvering, about acceleration, about ducking and diving to
capture the prey.”
SOURCE : http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/science/agility-not-speed-is-cheetahs-meal-ticket-study-says.html?_r=0
