WS More or Less: How fast are Alligators and Hippos?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 8 February 2020
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We all know that you should never smile at a crocodile, but rumour has it that alligators are great perambulators – at least that’s what a booklet about Florida’s wildlife claimed. Tim Harford speaks to John Hutchinson, Professor of evolutionary bio-mechanics to see whether he could outrun one of these reportedly rapid retiles. Also – our editor thinks he could outrun a hippo, is he right? (…probably not).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:03.7 | We're the program that takes nebulous numbers and forms them into clusters of clarity. |
| 0:08.2 | And I'm Tim Halford. |
| 0:11.2 | Royal listener Deep Singh wrote into More or Less at bbc.co.uk with a following question. |
| 0:18.4 | In a small booklet about the plant's animals in Florida, |
| 0:22.6 | I read an allegory with this tail off the ground, |
| 0:25.7 | can run as fast as 30 miles per hour, which translates to about 13.4 meters per second, |
| 0:33.9 | about 30% faster than someone like you saying both. |
| 0:37.8 | Can this be possible? |
| 0:39.2 | What you got going is the alligator stroll. |
| 0:44.6 | Okay. |
| 0:45.4 | We called in an expert, John Hutchinson, Professor of Evolutionary Biomechanics |
| 0:50.4 | at Royal Veterinary Colleges, Structure and Motion Laboratory. Hello, John. |
| 0:55.5 | So you've been in Florida racing alligators and crocodiles? |
| 0:59.9 | Yes, I have. I've spent quite a bit of time there studying their movement. |
| 1:03.6 | What is that actually involved? |
| 1:05.4 | Well, we built a very simple sort of race track, just about five meters long and a meter or so wide, |
| 1:13.2 | and let various crocodilians go at one end and coax them to go toward the other end. |
| 1:19.0 | That you coax a crocodile or an alligator? |
| 1:21.7 | Sometimes you just let them go and they go away from you because they don't like you. |
| 1:26.0 | Other times you have to poke them with the blunt end of a broom or something. |
| 1:30.8 | I would just have imagined hamburg as at the other end, but does that not work as a motivator? |
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