The Fastest Tongue in Animal Kingdom

Researchers proves that chameleon's tongue is ridiculously fast. Some of the world's smallest chameleons have the world's fastest tongues. In automotive terms, the tongue could go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in a hundredth of a second, though it only needs about 20 milliseconds to snag a pey.

Chameleons spring-load the elastic tissue in their tongue, catapulting it toward prey when they strike, and giving them the highest acceleration and power output of any reptile, bird, or mammal.

Chameleon's long, elastic tongues are one of the fastest muscles in the animal kingdom, extending more than twice their body length and packing 14,000 watts of power per kilo. But it is the smallest species that strike fastest, according to a new study.

Researchers filmed tongue strikes of chameleons attacking a suspended cricket, at 3000 frames per second. They found that the animal's tongues are capable of impressive acceleration, doing 0 kilometers to 100 kilometers per hour in one-hundredth of a second, twice as fast as the fastest car.

The secret of chameleons is that they don’t just use spontaneous muscle power to fling their tongues. They preload most of the motion’s total energy into elastic tissues in their tongue. The recoil of those tissues greatly augments what muscle alone can do on the fly to catch a fly.

Larger chameleons produced impressive motions, too, but not compared to their smaller cousins. For example, a roughly two-foot-long species, Furcifer oustaleti, managed a peak acceleration less than 18 percent that of the tiny champ, Rhampholeon spinosus.

Various scientific reports, suggest that, the motion has the highest acceleration and power output produced per kilogram of muscle mass by any reptile, bird, or mammal and is the second most powerful among any kind of vertebrate (only a salamander outdoes it). The total power output of the plucky R. spinosus chameleon’s tongue was 14,040 watts per kilogram.

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Posted by: Lusubilo A. Mwaijengo