I know the argument is pretty much done, but to use Blake’s favorite source (Knut Scmidt-Nielson) against him, check out his book Scaling: Why Is Animal Size So Important?.
So, 1 meter is about normal, but while the ranges vary by up to a factor of 3, this isn’t nearly the huge range you might expect.
Essentially, this section of his book has two points, that all things otherwise being equal, you would expect all animals to jump the same height (because of theoretical tradeoffs between additional muscle and additional mass).
However, since that isn’t the case you have to look at two factors to explain the range (which isn’t as big as you’d think) in jumping ability:
Size of animals – really small animals (such as fleas and grasshoppers) can not jump as high as you would expect because of air resistance issues (a flea only jumps about 27% as high as it could in a vacuum). And
Various mechanical advantages in different muscle formations.
I didn’t read this whole thread carefully (it got a little painful) but I hope this is still of some interest and hasn’t been repeated too many times. And hopefully that Amazon link above works (search inside the book is the best thing since peanut butter).
I don’t know - sometimes it’s helpful to point out the blatantly obvious. A fool certainly would not realize he is a fool unless some helpful person pointed it out.
That Blake fella just likes to argue. It’s amazing the dude wanted to argue for 4 pages that cats or whatever animal can’t jump high.
I only think my cat can jump on the fridge because people once thought the sun revolved around the earth! Or whatever his point was.
As near as I can tell from reading one chapter of that book, if you scaled a housecat up to our size (or gave us the leg muscles and mechanics of a cat) you would still jump about the same height as a housecat (all things being equal, animals of similar mechanics but different masses will jump the same height).
However, you will be able to reach greater heights because your center of mass will be higher than for a housecat. A lion (10 feet long when fully extended is going to be able to get up onto platforms 16-18 feet high, but it still raised it center of gravity (before its front feet touched the platform and began a difference sequence of mechanics) 1.5 to 2 meters.
Note, however, that if we are now accepting that the galago has the highest recorded jump, that those reports of 6 meters for the puma must have been exaggerated or assisted.
And if you think about this summer’s big Box Office Bomb, you realize that it doesn’t much matter how strong the Increcible Hulk got, he still wouldn’t be able to jump hundreds of feet into the air.
I like the irony of that. Motion being relative and all, from the frame of referance of the earth the sun does orbit the earth once a day.
whoa! deje vu, I think we just completed an orbit, cause we been here before.
I am making absolutely no exaggeration here when I tell you that my cat routinely jumps from the floor to the top of the fridge—without ANY scramble (well, depending on whether or not I’ve given her catnip that day)—up to where I have her food. (Tiny studio apartment; gotta put it somewhere! ) I am fully prepared to provide documentary evidence of this because vids or it’s not real.
And it seems to me there is some confusion going on.
One is, how high can Animal X raise its center of gravity?
Another is, how far up can Animal X get? That is, can a cat jump onto the top of a 5 1/2 foot tall fridge?
Cats are a lot longer than you think. The cat is not raising its center of gravity five and a half feet. They just need to get an upper paw onto the top of the fridge, and then use their front legs to pull themselves up.
The 12 year old cites of servals catching birds 10 feet in the air are neglecting this factor also. The serval doesn’t raise its center of gravity 10 feet. It gets one paw 10 feet off the ground. Servals have really long legs and are extremely stretchy. They jump as high as possible, which raises their center of gravity much less than 10 feet, then stretch up as high as possible with a paw, which could easily be 4 feet higher than their center of gravity. So that only requires the serval to raise their center of gravity to 6 feet. And they probably started at 1 foot, which means the jump is actually only 5 feet. Yes, that’s more than “about a meter”. But cats are better at jumping than your average mammal, even so it’s not twice the average.
So jumping up to catch a bird 10 feet in the air, or jumping up to a fridgetop that is 5.5 feet, is a different ability than raising the center of gravity 10 feet or 5.5 feet. The cat reaches well above its center of gravity with the front paws, which are much higher than you would naively expect unless you’ve seen how far even a small cat can extend its body.
Wait, hold up: is this really how this thread played out? There weren’t, like, a bunch of posts that just got deleted? Dude spent, like, forty-odd posts demanding a peer-reviewed source, and he finally got one, and then he never came back, not even to acknowledge or discredit the cite? That really happened?
And to make matters even odder, Blake is still an active member, even though I don’t remember noticing him. Let’s hope that he’s learned some common sense in the last 12 years.
This argument was continued in a Pit thread – it started as a pitting of RealityChuck and veered over to the leaping question (around post #40).
There was extensive evaluation of leaping animals from YouTube videos.The best of the videos provided good evidence of a Savannah cat leaping 120% of a meter – there was a ruler that allowed a good estimation of the cat’s extended length, and also let you see how high its head reached in a straight vertical jump from a standing start.
Blake’s claim was that the highest animals could leap (based on center of gravity) was “about a meter.” Does 120% qualify as “about”?
Here’s a link to "page 3"of that thread, but I haven’t checked for link rot.
This is my analysis of the video reprinted from the Pit thread:
Based on the slow-mo image at 3:32 of the video, the kitty’s head reached 7’3" (87") and the length of the fully stretched cat was about 39" from paw to head top. (Measured against the ruling stick in the same frame.)
So, the head top moved 48" vertical inches, pretty much straight up. That’s 120% of a meter. Pretty good. We can’t see if it’s a standing (rather than a running) jump, but I strongly believe it is.
For those who don’t know, an F1 Savannah is a first generation cross of a domestic cat and a serval. That in no way disqualifies its jump, but it is a larger animal than a house cat. It looks like the animals in Colonial’s video might also be Savannahs.
In the video the foot markers were the TOP of the tape, rather than the bottom or middle, hence the judging of the jump at 7’3".
In any event, it remains true that how high an animal can jump is mostly unrelated to its size. Cats can jump better than most animals, but that’s because feline physiology is well-suited to jumping, not because of their size.
True. All that was ever being argued in this thread was the extent to which that limit is absolute. Physics makes increased jump height a game of sharply diminishing returns, but that isn’t the same as saying there is a universal hard limit where increased height goes abruptly from possible to impossible.
Just a data point: the world record high jump for a horse is 2.32m, set in 1978 Nick Skelton on Everest Lastic. This is a youtube.
A horse’s centre of gravity is about a metre or so off the ground Riding Art - balance of the horse given the horse is neither very tall nor very short. Everest Lastic’s height is not given, but his sire, sire’s sire and sire’s dam were all about 154-158 cm at the withers.
So this horse’s CoG was lifted about 1.32m off the ground. It is not a standing jump.
It is not, as you note, a standing jump. Also, horses – and cats and deer and most quadrapeds – leap from their hind legs, which elevates their center of gravity prior to the actual jump. So, the “about a meter” figure for a horse’s center of gravity isn’t significant.
Most high jumping animals leap from their hind legs and elevating their centre of gravity “before the actual jump” could be considered part of the jump. It certainly isn’t a cheat because it gives them less acceleration space.
Anyways I remember this thread. A quick google can bring up some bushbaby standing jumps that are clearly waaay more than 2 feet. They are other worldly.
As Chronos notes a couple of posts upstream, the relevant issue – regarding the OPs question – is that the size of an animal is largely unrelated to how high it can jump.
The “two feet” leap you refer to was from one of Blake’s first posts in this thread, and he stated he was writing from memory. Shortly thereafter he consulted some sources and amended the 2-feet to “about a meter.” He was reporting what he believed to be the best researched evidence, and invited correction.
I have not seen any better evidence of the limits of animal leaping than the Savannah cat video that I linked to a few posts back. If you could provide some even better videos that would be great.
As for considering an animal to have jumped before it has left the ground… I don’t. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding your point, but I don’t considering a rearing horse to have jumped at all. I suppose we could discuss which animals have the longest upward shift of center of gravity in a given time frame, but that sounds like a new topic.
The standard measure of jumping from a standstill for a human being is the Basketball Rim. We measure how high we can reach as a result of jumping, not how high we move our CG or anything else. I don’t know what the OP meant by ‘legs as powerful as a housecat’. For most humans they’d barely be able to jump at all with such small legs, for me those legs might break just trying to stand on them. Assuming he meant legs of comparable size to a humans with the relative power of a housecat then I’m not sure what would happen, but I can’t see cat muscles being all that much stronger per pound than humans, so the different structure of a cat’s legs may have some advantage, they have a more complex foot and the bone and muscles structure isn’t oriented for walking upright, so maybe they have some advantage there in jumping that would probably leave you with some difficulty walking. But all told I don’t think you would jump considerably higher than with your own legs.
) I am fully prepared to provide documentary evidence of this because vids or it’s not real.