This is a list of the fastest animals in the world, by types of animal.
Fastest organism
The fastest land animal is the
cheetah. The
peregrine falcon
The peregrine falcon (''Falco peregrinus''), also known as the peregrine, and historically as the duck hawk in North America, is a cosmopolitan bird of prey (raptor) in the family Falconidae. A large, crow-sized falcon, it has a blue-grey bac ...
is the fastest bird, and the fastest member of the
animal kingdom, with a
diving speed of .
Among the fastest animals in the sea is the
black marlin, with uncertain and conflicting reports of recorded speeds.
When drawing comparisons between different classes of animals, an alternative unit is sometimes used for organisms: ''body length per second''. On this basis the 'fastest' organism on earth, relative to its body length, is the Southern Californian mite, ''
Paratarsotomus macropalpis
''Paratarsotomus macropalpis'' is a species of mite belonging to the family Anystidae. The mite is endemic to Southern California and is usually observed darting amongst sidewalks and in rocky areas. Earlier classified as belonging to genus '' T ...
'', which has a speed of 322 body lengths per second.
The equivalent speed for a human, running as fast as this mite, would be .
The speed of the ''P. macropalpis'' is far in excess of the previous record holder, the Australian
tiger beetle ''
Cicindela eburneola'', which is the fastest insect in the world relative to body size, with a recorded speed of , or 171 body lengths per second.
The
cheetah, the fastest land mammal, scores at only 16 body lengths per second,
while
Anna's hummingbird
Anna's hummingbird (''Calypte anna'') is a medium-sized bird species of the family Trochilidae. It was named after Anna Masséna, Duchess of Rivoli.
It is native to western coastal regions of North America. In the early 20th century, Anna's hu ...
has the highest known length-specific velocity attained by any
vertebrate
Vertebrates () comprise all animal taxa within the subphylum Vertebrata () ( chordates with backbones), including all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. Vertebrates represent the overwhelming majority of the phylum Chordata, with ...
.
owever 'body length per second' is a theoretically dubious unit which cannot be justified by engineering/physics dimensional analysis, it implies for example that a 2m long shark should be able to swim 10 times as fast as it could when it was a 20 cm long juvenile, and that a large bird three times as long as a small bird of similar type and shape ought be able to fly three times faster than the small bird, neither being what hydrodynamic/aerodynamic analysis would predict or what happens in nature].
Invertebrates
Fish
Due to physical constraints, fish may be incapable of exceeding swim speeds of 36 km/h (22 mph).
Larger reported figures are therefore highly questionable.
Amphibians
Reptiles
Birds
Mammals
See also
*
Speed records
A speed record is a world record for speed by a person, animal, or vehicle. The function of speed record is to record the speed of moving animate objects such as humans, animals or vehicles.
Overall speed record
Overall speed record is the recor ...
Notes
References
{{Reflist, 32em
Lists of animals
Fastest
Biological records