User talk:Aracauria

Max swim speeds

Hi Aracauria, I was surprised to see you removing so many apparently well-cited speed estimates, but I must say that after looking into it a bit - the data are indeed often rather scarce, and there seems have been a fair amount of handwaving and misquoting going on in the literature. Digging into the shortfin mako as an example, Diez et al. 2015 [1] happily state burst speeds of up to 70 km/h, but their given source (Compagno et al. 2001, the FAO shark bible [2]) conveniently doesn't provide a number at all, just is capable of extreme bursts of speed when hooked and in pursuit of prey - then gives slow cruise speeds. I couldn't find a single study that talked about accurately measured mako burst speeds. - So, thanks for cleaning that stuff up a bit. It's possible there may be some backlash coming (people love their speed records...) but sticking to the sources should do it. Cheers --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 16:11, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I was a thought someone might notice that! I tried to correct various pages for marine animals regarded as especially fast. I believe these wildly inflated speeds stem from early estimates in the literature that involved eyeballing how fast an animal moved passed a ship. Actual tracking devices report speeds that are nowhere 70 km/h. Unfortunately, these exciting but inaccurate values have been reported in popular media, like BBC videos and fishing guides, and even occasionally repeated in scientific publications. If you go through the literature you will have trouble tracking down any reputable (recent) measurement above 20-30 km/h for any marine species. This likely reflects the challenges posed by resistance from water and, possibly, cavitation-related injury. Aracauria (talk) 22:08, 18 June 2020 (UTC)Aracauria