Cheetahs are no longer the fastest land animal in the world, according to research from California-based scientists.
Instead, tiny mites, from the Anystidae family, are the fastest in the animal kingdom.
A cheetah would still win a race against a mite when it comes to distance. But when it comes to "body lengths per second," meaning speed in terms of body size, mites are faster, Science Daily reported. In other words, mites can run 20 times faster than a cheetah, the equivalent of a human running 1,300 miles per hour.
"It's so cool to discover something that's faster than anything else, and just to imagine, as a human, going that fast compared to your body length is really amazing," Samuel Rubin, a junior physics major at California's Pitzer College who helped conduct the study, said according to Science Daily.
The mite, or Paratarsotomus macropalpis, is the size of a sesame seed. Mites have been known to exist since 1916, but little is actually known about its lifestyle or eating habits.
Rubin and his research partner, Jonathan Wright, a biology professor at Pomona College, made the discovery by using high-speed cameras to capture how fast mites run in their natural habitat. The smaller an animal is, the faster its speed and stride. Wright wanted to see if there was a limit to how fast insects can go.
"We were looking at the overarching question of whether there is an upper limit to the relative speed or stride frequency that can be achieved," Wright said according to Science Daily. "When the values for mites are compared with data from other animals, they indicate that, if there is an upper limit, we haven't found it yet."
Not only were the mites too fast for the cameras, but they were able to run on concrete that was 140 degrees in temperature, which most animals are unable to do.
The findings were presented Sunday at the 2014 Experimental Biology meeting in San Diego.
