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Post by Infinity Blade on Aug 31, 2024 3:55:08 GMT 5
According to one study, lions have lower BFQs than other cats but not to a significant degree. The researchers suggest this is because they are pack predator but there is something weird about their results. If we take the graph at face value, servals, cheetahs, ocelot's, servals, and lynxes would have a higher BFQ than lions which just sounds wrong. academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/article/151/2/423/2630862#81714876@infinity Blade I also subscribed to the idea that there aren't really enough meaningful differences to declare whether a lion or tiger is a superior fighter. What are your thoughts on the study's results? Do you think there is also something wonky going on? Carnivoran bite force studies come up with a variety of results when it comes to bite force quotient from what I've seen. Idk how some of the results are arrived at, but it could be that if the body mass estimate is inaccurate, that will obviously skew bite force quotient. I do think it is weird for a lion to have a proportionately weaker bite than smaller prey specialist cats. It is true that big cats have somewhat longer jaws proportionately (in order to engulf the larger body parts of larger prey), but I doubt that's significant enough to give the lion a weaker bite. So in short, maybe this isn't impossible (because after all, as long as the skull and teeth can withstand the stress, what ultimately determines bite force is the strength of the jaw adductors), but I wouldn't take these results immediately at face value. |
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Post by Supercommunist on Aug 31, 2024 5:06:50 GMT 5
Yeah I find it hard to believe that there is more selective presure for a small rodent/bird specialist to develop a stronger bite than a lion, macropredatory animals famous for their brutal intraspecific fights.
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Post by Verdugo on Sept 1, 2024 15:28:52 GMT 5
According to one study, lions have lower BFQs than other cats but not to a significant degree. The researchers suggest this is because they are pack predator but there is something weird about their results. If we take the graph at face value, servals, cheetahs, ocelot's, servals, and lynxes would have a higher BFQ than lions which just sounds wrong. academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/article/151/2/423/2630862#81714876@infinity Blade I also subscribed to the idea that there aren't really enough meaningful differences to declare whether a lion or tiger is a superior fighter. What are your thoughts on the study's results? Do you think there is also something wonky going on? You can understand BFQ as Bite Force / Body Mass. Technically it is not, however, for the sake of our discussion, let just say it is. So there are 2 variables that affect BFQ, which are estimated Bite Force and estimated Body Mass. Bite Forces are estimated using dry skull method, which is on its own already a bit wonky. For instances, dry skull method does not accurately reconstruct muscle anatomical cross sectional area (ACSA); muscle force vector is usually assumed a single vector through the muscle centroid, which is simplified and not accurate; muscle architecture details such as fibre length and pennation angle are also assumed. Body Mass is estimated from condylobasal Skull Length. You can see why this is an issue. Animals with relatively longer skull such as Lions will have overestimated Body Mass, and thus underestimated BFQ. On the other hand, animals with relatively shorter skull such as Cheetah will have underestimated Body Mass, and thus overestimated BFQ |
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Post by Supercommunist on Sept 2, 2024 6:23:31 GMT 5
I did find it a bit weird how the cougar was one few cats with a BFQ in the 100's despites having a proportionately smaller skulls than lions, leopards, or tigers. So your explanation makes sense.
Still it is weird that most of the cats had BFQs in the 90's range, except the lion.
I am not a lion fanboy, cat's don't make it into my top 100 favorite animals, but I can't but think there is bit of biased against them in literature. A few decades ago, male lions were seen as dead beats that didn't hunt, and while that misconception has mostly gone away it seems some think they are less impressive because of their pack hunting structure.
Granted their are times when animals will trade individual fighting prowess for strength in numbers, but there are also cases when the opposite happens. Spotted hyenas for instance are larger and more impressive than their solitary rivals.
Lions do seem to have noticeably smaller canines than tigers on advantage, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was an advantage that came with that, like increased jaw gape or something.
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Post by Supercommunist on Nov 1, 2024 7:09:25 GMT 5
Peregine falcons have 129 HZ vision compared to a Harris hawk's 79. For referene, humans have 50 to 60 hz vision. So, I suppose pergines effectively see the world in x 0.5 speed. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31822552/ |
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Post by theropod on Nov 1, 2024 23:33:44 GMT 5
If I were to claim "animal A is 5 times stronger than animal B", my intended meaning would be "it could excert a higher absolute amount of force overall, with its entire body", not "per unit of muscle cross-section it could generate 5× the power or force output". It would be my impression that the same is probably the intended meaning when people go around claiming that "chimpanzees are 5 or 6 times as strong as humans". I don’t know if there is any sort of truth or evidence to that claim, but this is not a falsification of it either.
Interpreting "stronger than" as referring to the specific tension of the muscle fibers is very misleading, as by that metric a house cat is also "stronger" than either a human, or chimp, or even an elephant or blue whale. In fact by this metric, any animal with more fast-twitch muscle fibers (which have higher specific tension) would always be defined as "stronger" than any other animal with more slow-twitch fibers. Not a very meaningful concept of "strength".
My guess would be that chimpanzees do not just have more fast-twitch muscle fiber relatively speaking, but also have considerably thicker shoulder and arm muscles muscles than the average human, and possibly also greater mechanical advantage for some muscles, and thus probably have an average overall upper body strength that is more than "just" 1.35 times that of the average human.
I doubt it is 5 or 6 times (the commonly quoted figure you see repeated everywhere), although I suspect that the origin of such a figure might be based on some very narrowly defined strength indicator (e.g. grip strength) and very specific human analogue and has then been falsely generalized to the entire animal (i.e. how much stronger the animal is, in absolute terms, across a range of different motions) and comparisons between the entire species (whereas of course, especially for humans, a single individual can be a very poor representation for the range of strength found in our species, depending on that person’s level of physical activity).
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Post by Supercommunist on Nov 2, 2024 0:13:50 GMT 5
If I were to claim "animal A is 5 times stronger than animal B", my intended meaning would be "it could excert a higher absolute amount of force overall, with its entire body", not "per unit of muscle cross-section it could generate 5× the power or force output". It would be my impression that the same is probably the intended meaning when people go around claiming that "chimpanzees are 5 or 6 times as strong as humans". I don’t know if there is any sort of truth or evidence to that claim, but this is not a falsification of it either. Interpreting "stronger than" as referring to the specific tension of the muscle fibers is very misleading, as by that metric a house cat is also "stronger" than either a human, or chimp, or even an elephant or blue whale. In fact by this metric, any animal with more fast-twitch muscle fibers (which have higher specific tension) would always be defined as "stronger" than any other animal with more slow-twitch fibers. Not a very meaningful concept of "strength". My guess would be that chimpanzees do not just have more fast-twitch muscle fiber relatively speaking, but also have considerably thicker shoulder and arm muscles muscles than the average human, and possibly also greater mechanical advantage for some muscles, and thus probably have an average overall upper body strength that is more than "just" 1.35 times that of the average human. I doubt it is 5 or 6 times (the commonly quoted figure you see repeated everywhere), although I suspect that the origin of such a figure might be based on some very narrowly defined strength indicator (e.g. grip strength) and very specific human analogue and has then been falsely generalized to the entire animal (i.e. how much stronger the animal is, in absolute terms, across a range of different motions) and comparisons between the entire species (whereas of course, especially for humans, a single individual can be a very poor representation for the range of strength found in our species, depending on that person’s level of physical activity). A cat the size of a human would probably be considerably stronger than a human though. Humans admittedly are considerably larger than chimpanzees on average and have different proportions so its hard to directly compare strength but a 35 to 50 percent strength difference guestimate honestly does seem roughly accurate. I once saw a video of a chimpanzee throwing a tantrum after it struggled to lift a 145 pound weight. For context, the chimpanzee was being rewarded every it lifted a weight up. While the chimp likely could lift more if it really wanted to, its anger suggests that lifting 145 pounds is strenuous for it. There is also a video of a overweight man wrestling with a chained chimp in a circus. I won't post since it is animal cruelty but the man didn't get dominated in the grappling match, though he did look a lot heavier. I think at most, the strength difference between a man and a hypothetical similar sized chimp would be about the the same as the difference between an average man and women, though that is admittedly a big difference. |
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Post by theropod on Nov 3, 2024 21:20:10 GMT 5
They are, but there exists considerable overlap between their size ranges. As I noted before, the common wisdom talking about "5x as strong" is (probably deliberately) very vague, and it is unclear what it is referring to. Average specimens of both? Maybe, but that I would not put that much trust in a vague and unconvincing claim that keeps repeated throughout popular articles actually being statistically solid and representative.
A large male chimp can absolutely be of similar size to a male human, and famous and shocking attacks of chimpanzees on humans have usually been perpetrated by large males, not by small females.
So perhaps (due to the propensity of popular-scientific comparisons to use non-representative specimens as a basis) that is the kind of animal that was actually implicitly being talked about when claiming they were "5 times the strength of a human" – and, as I wrote, there are easily ways to make the comparison even less representative if, for example, it was based on one or few biased or arbitrary strength metrics (just like you could conceivably make a house cat stronger than an elephant if you just went by specific muscle tension).
Ultimately, the point remains that the strength difference between chimpanzees and humans, whatever it may be, boils down to more than just simply the specific tension of their muscle fibers.
That is one relevant factor in how strong animals are, but it is not even the most important one (that obviously would be body mass, no amount of fast-twitch muscle fibers is going to make a house cat stronger than an elephant by any reasonable definition of the word "stronger"). And trying to reduce a question like this to one single metric like this is very misleading, when it really depends on a complex interaction between a whole range of factors besides just specific muscle tension.
The chimp’s smaller average size, for example, would decrease the difference between average humans and chimps, while more muscle tissue or relatively thicker muscles (again, I suspect a chimp has relatively more musculature in its arms and upper body, at the expense of its legs, and many conceptions of "strength" are focused on what’s actually just upper body strength) would increase it. A small female chimp, for example, is probably not stronger than an average adult human male (that is 2 or 3 times heavier than it, after all), but conversely a male chimp that is the same body mass as the human may well be considerably more than 1.35 times as strong because the average human male is just not very muscular, in addition to its muscles being weaker (in short bursts) per unit of cross-sectional area than those of the chimp.
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Post by Supercommunist on Nov 4, 2024 2:03:06 GMT 5
They are, but there exists considerable overlap between their size ranges. As I noted before, the common wisdom talking about "5x as strong" is (probably deliberately) very vague, and it is unclear what it is referring to. Average specimens of both? Maybe, but that I would not put that much trust in a vague and unconvincing claim that keeps repeated throughout popular articles actually being statistically solid and representative. A large male chimp can absolutely be of similar size to a male human, and famous and shocking attacks of chimpanzees on humans have usually been perpetrated by large males, not by small females. So perhaps (due to the propensity of popular-scientific comparisons to use non-representative specimens as a basis) that is the kind of animal that was actually implicitly being talked about when claiming they were "5 times the strength of a human" – and, as I wrote, there are easily ways to make the comparison even less representative if, for example, it was based on one or few biased or arbitrary strength metrics (just like you could conceivably make a house cat stronger than an elephant if you just went by specific muscle tension). Ultimately, the point remains that the strength difference between chimpanzees and humans, whatever it may be, boils down to more than just simply the specific tension of their muscle fibers. That is one relevant factor in how strong animals are, but it is not even the most important one (that obviously would be body mass, no amount of fast-twitch muscle fibers is going to make a house cat stronger than an elephant by any reasonable definition of the word "stronger"). And trying to reduce a question like this to one single metric like this is very misleading, when it really depends on a complex interaction between a whole range of factors besides just specific muscle tension. The chimp’s smaller average size, for example, would decrease the difference between average humans and chimps, while more muscle tissue or relatively thicker muscles (again, I suspect a chimp has relatively more musculature in its arms and upper body, at the expense of its legs, and many conceptions of "strength" are focused on what’s actually just upper body strength) would increase it. A small female chimp, for example, is probably not stronger than an average adult human male (that is 2 or 3 times heavier than it, after all), but conversely a male chimp that is the same body mass as the human may well be considerably more than 1.35 times as strong because the average human male is just not very muscular, in addition to its muscles being weaker (in short bursts) per unit of cross-sectional area than those of the chimp. I do realize that measuring strength is a rather complicated subject,but ultimately it is unlikely we'll ever get a fully nuanced comparsion between a human strength's and another animals, except maybe a domestic animal like a horse. I do agree that if there is any truth to the 5 to 6 times stronger claim it would refer to a hyper specific task, but I think that is even more reason why we should discredit the claim. Flies, for instance have HZ 250 hz vision compared to our mere 50 to 60 but it would be inaccurate to say that flies have eyes that are 5 times better than us given that humans have much sharper vision and would outpreform fly in other visual taks. Even if we use a compare an office worker that never worked in their life , the chimps are "5 to 6 times stronger figure is rather absurd if you look at actual video evidence of the subject. I found the clip of the chimpanzee throwing a tantrum after struggling to lift a weight turns. Turns out the the weight was actually 95 kg, which is a lot more impressive than 145 pounds I misrecalled but I think most men that don't have a health condition should be able to lift at least 100 pounds, so if a chimp where anywhere as people claimed, a 200 IB weight wouldn't be problem. 19:48 At 3:29 a male orang was able to lift the 95 kg weight and an adult woman, which does shown that orangutans have much stronger arms than unconditioned human men, though I'd wager the strength difference is more like two to three times stronger rather than 5 to 6. Of course, it also worth mentioning that trained human punchers can generate much more impactful strikes than other apes since we are the only apes that strike with a clenched fist. Heck, I think even a street fighter would punch much harder than a chimp could smack something. I would also argue that the ability to punch and kick hard is more important than pulling or lifting strength in a hypothetical fight between a human and a chimp or an orang. |
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Post by theropod on Nov 4, 2024 6:01:58 GMT 5
Yes, I think fully nuanced comparisons between the strengths of different animals are almost impossible to make – which is the reason why I am so insistent to point out the difference between specific muscle tension and "strength". It is also not super obvious to determine who is the "strongest human", because there are different athletic disciplines that measure different kinds of strength across different movements. One guy might be able to pull a slightly greater mass, while another might be able to benchpress or deadlift a slightly greater mass. Only if one single guy produces the greatest force across most or all relevant disciplines would I say it is uncontroversial to call them "the strongest".
So what exactly constitutes one animal being "stronger" than another is very hard to comprehensively and scientifically define in a non-arbitrary manner. I sure as hell cannot do it, and I think most others cannot either – the closest suggestion I can come up with (while still hard to apply in practice) would be to think of the overall strength of an animal similarly to how we inflation is measured by using the cost across a standardized selection of goods and services: using a representative selection of comparable motions and actions and determining the forces each animal can exert across each of them as a sort of "strength index".
It is a lot easier to say what does not constitute one animal being stronger than another. I think on that we can probably reach a consensus: For example I’m sure we can all agree that a cat having higher contractile force per square cm of muscle tissue does not mean it is "stronger" than an elephant. In fact it’s (hopefully) uncontroversial to say that an elephant is far stronger than a cat in any and all meaningful ways, although the only reason this is so easy to determine for this specific case is the elephant being vastly larger.
With most cases (lion vs zebra, human vs chimp, etc.) where the size discrepancy is less pronounced (so that it is not immediately obvious that it outweighs all other factors, like muscle physiology, fiber architecture or musculoskeletal mechanics and anatomy) this straightforward statement becomes a lot harder to make, and saying one animal is stronger than another animal because it has moderately higher specific muscle tension is just as incorrect as saying one animal is stronger than another because it is slightly larger on average, or has a slightly more compact morphology.
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