It’s quite true that an albatross’ standard approach to flying is to use dynamic soaring with little to no flapping. But (according to the above-mentioned albatross vsistor center) they do use flapping flight when necessary to commute short (20-50km) distances to fishing areas they use when feeding a chick on the nest. In such flight they average about 100kph.
It has been shown that there’s a good correlation between the wingloading of a bird (weight per square foot of wing area) and its efficient flight speed. Since a large albatross has about the highest wingloading of any bird, you’d expect its flight speeds to be high - as they are. (An excellent book that discusses this is The Simple Science of Flight by Henk Tennekes.)
Here’s a link (PDF) to an excerpt from the book Built for Speed - A Year in the Life of a Pronghorn in which the author mentions a top speed “close to 60 miles per hour” and a speed of 45 mph for “several miles”.
He also begins one sentence with “When a pronghorn breaks into an easy, rocking canter (a 30 mph pace that it can keep upindefinitely) …” If we assume this is a exaggerated and that “indefinitely” means “15 minutes” that means the pronghorn can then rest for at least 45 minutes and still stay well ahead of human pursuit. If the estimate of 30 minutes is valid, the pronghorn has 1.5 to 2 hours to relax before the next jog.
Well, I guess I’m not the only one that missed it. Check the OP again:
He’s offering two alternatives, and we’re discussing the physiological one, which takes place on an “infinitely long savanna.” I think I’ve demonstrated that if we ignore that phrase and take terrain into account, it’s not true that humans can catch anything through dint of perseverence and long-distance running.
The Great Dance: A Hunter’s Story is a documentary on the life of a tribe of San (bushmen) hunters which captured just such an event - the two hunters chased an eland (if memory serves) for over four hours in temperatures exceeding 46ºC (120ºF) until it simply stopped running and just stood there and let them kill it. They called it the “chasing hunt” and it was the most remarkable sequence! Afterwards the hunter said that he “actually became the animal” so that he could see where it was going, even though he couldn’t see it - which I suppose is his way of saying that he could predict where it would run based on terrain, etc and take shortcuts.
In this case the terrain was not endless savanaha, but rugged semi-desert in the Kalahari - so rough that the Landrovers on which the cameras were mounted had a real job on thier hands to keep up with hunter and prey.
The prongorn and its many relatives ARE very, very fast for short distances, but they CAN’T keep it up for very long.
Of course, neither can most of their predators. A cheetah can’t run at top speed for very long either, so he’ll either catch his antelope in under a minute or he won’t catch the antelope at all.
And a cheetah’s strategy is, in large measure, based on wearing out and taking down an exhausted antelope. Running 50 mph is exhausting, and no ruminant can do it for very long. The cheetah hopes to have just a BIT more endurance than his prey.
The ability to run 50 mph for a minute is very useful against some predators, even MOST predators. But not against one who’s determined to keep up the chase long after the antelope thinks the chase is supposed to be over.
I just got the May issue of Discover magazine yesterday and there was an article about this very subject, basically agreeing with Blake’s comments in this thread. I’ll dig it up when I get home tonight and post the relevant excerpts.
I saw something like this in a nature show. The exhausted cheeta just lay next to the prey they had caught after a minute or two of chasing. Then, a couple of wild dogs just sauntered up and stole the carcass. The cheeta was too tired to try and keep it, let alone even move.
I think you’re using the term “endurance” differently than most people do. No one talks about endurance running when the time scale is 1 minute. That’s a full out sprint. Cheetahs don’t wear out their prey, but capture them on the run, relying on speed and maneuverability (that’s what the tail is for) to catch them.
Note that pronghorns don’t have relatives. They are colloquially called “antelopes” because of superficial similarities with that group of animals, but they are in fact not much alike.
Note further that the contention that pronghorns can’t keep running for very long directly conflicts with the book I quoted above.
One puzzle about the pronghorn why it’s so damn fast, since it’s much faster than any predator currently in North America. The answer seems to be that there once were cheetah-like cats on the Great Plains, which became extinct during the Pleistocene.
I’ve been a lurker here for a couple of years. Finally decided to add my $.02.
I know from personal experience that a man can run down an animal. As children, my younger brother and I used to run down and catch rabbits, ground squirrels, and chipmunks regularly.
While I doubt that I could do so at the age of 42, it wasn’t really all that difficult from the ages of 12 to 17.
As was posted previously, animals only run until they no longer perceive a threat. This allows you to stay close enough that you can continue to threaten them until they tire, thus allowing you to catch and capture them.
Never saw the follow-up. I don’t have my issue in hand but the opening sentences are available online. The article is coincidentally focused on exactly the OP. The subtitle is
The thrust of the article is that humans are very well adapted for long-distance running, both biomechanically and by the ability to dissipate heat. Conditioned humans can run down nearly any animal to the point of overheating where they become virtually helpless.
You can read parts of their findings here, here and here.
I find this very interesting because in my Taxonomy class, the teacher keeps telling us that locomotion spurs evolution of higher lifeforms. A coelomate has a greater range of movement than a pseudocoelomate which can move more than a acoelomate.