BBSRC-funded researcher Professor Alan Wilson studies movement in animals.
His team are working towards an understanding of how very fast animals move in order to
achieve remarkably high speeds.
Having worked on race horses and greyhounds they have now moved on to study cheetahs.
BBSRC went along to Whipsnade Zoo to see how Professor Wilson and his team are discovering
information that can be used to understand limb injuries that affect motion in many animals,
including humans.
So we are interested in animal locomotion in the broadest sense where that is all the
way from looking at dinosaurs, trying to understand the limits to them, for example could Tyrannosaurus
rex run, to looking at limits to performance, where performance is acceleration or turning
or maximum speed running in a range of animals some of them racing animals like human sprinters,
racing grey hounds, race horses through to understanding why they get injured what the
mechanisms of that injury are and so that is the basic science of how animals work.
The project we are doing here we're looking at cheetahs.
Cheetahs are fascinating because they are 50% faster than a racing grey hound or a race
horse which has been breed for high speed locomotion.
We know that different limits exist for racing grey hounds and for humans.
We don't know why the cheetah is so much faster it is just a little bit better in every way
or does it have fundamental differences in the way that it runs which means it is so
much quicker.
We want to find out what it is about cheetahs that makes them able to run so fast.
So to do that we have got these cameras that are able to record at really high speeds.
So your normal cameras will record at 25 frames per second these one will do up to 1000 so
we need that to be able to see every single little movement of their legs as they are
running so fast.
We have two on each side because when a cheetah gallops it does different things with each
side of its body so it uses what we call it an asymmetrical gate.
We've got these plates in the ground here which are able to measure the forces which
goes through their legs so they are basically like sophisticated Wii-fit boards that will
measure all the forces that they are applying to the ground.
And then we can start to determine the loads on the muscles and the skeleton and how much
mechanical work they are having to do to actually gallop.
So this is our lure and here you can see it is a big loop which goes all the way round
and with this piece we just catch a piece of chicken which is part of their ordinary
diet and she will chase that quite happily.
This is Arabia so she is about two years old and she is from Dubai so she is actually a
North African cheetah.
This is her reward at the end and she sits and happily munches after her run.
It is quite a nice way to give her enrichment as well.
It's basically a big game to her she loves it and it kind of mimics what they do in the
wild for their food.
We are just going to try and call her over so I will probably take a piece of chicken
with me.
Now she is looking a bit we can start the luring and she knows the noise so she will
come over hopefully.
There she goes.
So this is not just blue skies research to understand how animals work it has more practical
applications we are using it to look at dairy cattle where we want to detect which ones
are lame because lameness is a major problem welfare problem with dairy cattle.
We are looking at people who have lost limbs and understanding the problems they have and
how perhaps prosthetic limbs can be used to help them.
We use it similar work with cerebral palsy and looking at gate analysis where you are
trying to help the approach to managing people with these conditions so it really has a practical
application as well.
This is a first stage at what I hope is a programme of work so these cheetahs here are
only running as fast as a racing grey hound we hope to get these cheetahs running in a
larger area where they will go faster and perhaps also in the future go to Africa where
we can look at cheetahs when they are actually hunting and doing their maximum effort.