Champion Jumpers of the Animal World
JUMPING must be fun for many of the animal athletes. And yet, with the champion jumpers of the animal world, leaping is often a life or death matter, the means to win one’s living or to save one’s life. Still, it is of interest to humans to know which creatures excel in the long jump and which in the high jump.
An animal athlete does not have to be big to make champion-sized jumps. Consider, for example, the jumping mouse. It is only about three and a half inches long, but it uses its six-inch tail as a balancer while making tremendous leaps. On the hottest day a jumping mouse can make 8- to 10-foot hops without working up a sweat. The leap of one jumping mouse was measured at 12 feet. Little wonder that Audubon considered the jumping mouse as one of the most agile of all wild animals.
Leap, leap, bound; leap, leap, bound! Here comes the jack rabbit. Or, rather, there goes the jack rabbit! Just alarm a jack rabbit and away he goes by leaps and bounds. The bound is extra high, sometimes 5 feet or more. This is not all due to sheer exuberance; the rabbit likes to survey the land from the high point of its jump. It is a fine way to spot enemies! When chased by a fox or coyote, the white-tailed jack rabbit makes a long jump of 10 or 15 feet. If necessary, a jack rabbit may lengthen its jump to 20 feet or more! Clearly, the jack rabbit is no slouch in the art of jumping.
But to the kangaroo, the jack rabbit’s jumping may not be so impressive. An “old man” kangaroo thinks nothing of jumping 25 feet in one bound. One of the longest recorded leaps occurred in 1951, when, in the course of a chase, a female red kangaroo made a series of jumps that included one of 42 feet! Another report tells of a great gray kangaroo traveling over flat country in Western Australia. Its record hop was tape-measured at 44 feet 9 inches.
Kangaroos are no slouches either when it comes to the high jump. Standing taller than a man and often weighing 200 pounds, a full-grown kangaroo’s huge hind legs have steel-spring power, enabling it to sail over a 5- or 6-foot fence with ease. The record high jump was made by a Queensland kangaroo. Chased by dogs, it jumped over a pile of timber ten and a half feet high!
Deer and Antelope Athletes
In the world of antelope, we find some of the most talented leapers among earth’s creatures. The eland, Africa’s largest antelope, runs as fast as a horse and jumps high into the air. Wrote observer Louis S. B. Leakey: “A government experimental station at Kabete [Kenya] kept a herd when I was a boy, and there I first saw an example of these creatures’ astonishing ability to jump. Their paddock had a 7-foot wire fence around it, but one morning two bulls somehow got into a panic, cleared the fence with ease, and escaped. Since then I have witnessed similar feats on several occasions, and have never ceased to marvel at them.”
South Africa’s springbok or springbuck, as its name indicates, likes to jump. It leaps with head down and back arched, soaring to a height of eleven and a half feet!
Another amazing animal athlete is the klipspringer (Afrikaans: klip, “cliff”; springer, “jumper”). Here is a tiny, agile African antelope, some 3 feet long and weighing 20 pounds, that lives up to its name. The book Natural History of South Africa quotes an eyewitness who saw a klipspringer jump 30 feet from the edge of a rocky precipice to a jutting ledge below!
As for the high jump, these agile creatures bound up the most precipitous rocks like animated rubber balls. Did you know that the klipspringer has a fair claim to the high-jump championship among wildlife? Two klipspringers were seen to attain the top of a rocky pedestal, the sides of which sloped outward from bottom to top. The only possible way that the animals could have gained access to the top was from the ground—25 feet below!
The African antelope called “impala” is known for the gracefulness with which it sails over bushes and rocks. In jumping, this animal seems to float through the air in graceful undulations, very different from the springlike action of most antelopes. The impala bounds not only over bushes and rocks, but often over its companions as well. Under these conditions, a predator trying to concentrate on a single impala may well lose its opportunity in the confusion of jumping. Champion high jumpers, impalas can easily soar over an eight-foot barrier!
As for horizontal leaps, it appears that the longest leap of the impala is about 40 feet. But the impala is not alone in being such a remarkable long jumper. The white-tailed deer is also reported to have made a running long jump of over 40 feet!
Talented Feline Jumpers
The cat family, of course, has outstanding performers when it comes to jumping. The leopard and the lion, jumping to a height of 8 feet and possibly 10, do well. As for the long jump, at high speed the lion bounds in leaps of up to about 20 feet.
And no question about the tiger’s being talented. In Marvels & Mysteries of Our Animal World, Jack Denton Scott is quoted as saying that tigers “can actually jump 18 feet straight up or leap a 40-foot gorge without any seeming effort.”
The cougar or puma (also called mountain lion) could likewise put in a claim for being a champion jumper. An observer in Arizona reports: “I have seen the lion spring from the earth and land 12 or 15 feet above in a tree.” As for a long jump, one cougar made a jump that was measured in the snow as being nearly 40 feet!
Insect Jumpers
For their size and weight, insects appear to be the strongest jumpers in all the animal world. Crickets, grasshoppers and fleas rely on their jumping as a way of escaping from enemies. A field cricket can make a leap of two feet.
Grasshoppers and locusts do even better. They can probably jump the farthest of any insect—about 30 inches! Says the Life Nature Library book The Insects: “The jump of a common grasshopper is a most remarkable accomplishment. It can leap horizontally about 20 times its body length, equivalent to a human covering the length of a football field in just three broad jumps, or its trajectory might be straight up, a distance in human terms equal to jumping over a five-story building. . . . Each hind leg is . . . capable of generating a takeoff thrust nearly eight times the total weight of the insect. To deliver this kick, the tiny muscles must exert an astonishing amount of thrust, about 20,000 times their own weight.” In making such prodigious leaps, it is claimed that some 3,500 muscle fibers in each hind leg must be activated—all in a mere thirtieth of a second!
A champion flea’s 12-inch leap may appear modest by human standards, but it actually jumps 200 times the length of its own body! According to Guinness Book of World Records, “In one American experiment carried out in 1910 a specimen allowed to leap at will performed a long jump of 13 inches and a high jump of 7 3⁄4 inches,” the high jump being about 130 times its own height.
Remarkably, repeated jumping never seems to tire out a flea. One can jump along steadily for three straight days, 600 times an hour. Lift-off for a flea is so rapid that it reaches a peak acceleration of 140 G’s—more than 30 times that endured by astronauts during the launch of the Saturn 5 moon rocket.
There are, of course, many other creatures that might be mentioned as champion jumpers, such as the jumping spider, certain dogs and the horse, which can leap about 27 feet. But when man’s Creator gave a lesson in natural history to Job of the land of Uz, to what did He compare the horse’s ability to jump? Said Almighty God: “Can you cause it [the horse] to leap like a locust?” (Job 39:20) God thus compared the horse’s jumping ability to that master jumper, the locust, a mere insect. And who gave the horse its ability to leap like a locust? Yes, who gave all these creatures jumping ability? Not Job, not any man, but the grand Creator. To him goes the credit for the amazing feats of earth’s champion jumpers.
[Chart on page 23]
SOME CHAMPION LONG JUMPERS
(Probable maximum jump)
Name Feet
Kangaroo 44
White-tailed deer 40
Impala 40
Cougar 40
Tiger 40
[Man] 29
Horse 27
Jack rabbit 23
Lion 20
Jumping mouse 12
Grasshopper 2 1⁄2
Field cricket 2
Flea 1
[Chart on page 23]
SOME CHAMPION HIGH JUMPERS
(Probable maximum jump)
Name Feet
Klipspringer 25
Tiger 18
Cougar 12-15
Springbok 11
Kangaroo 10
Leopard 10
Lion 10
Horse 8 1⁄2
Impala 8
White-tailed deer 8
[Man] 7 1⁄2
Jack rabbit 7
Jumping mouse 3