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This week is another suggestion from Wyatt, all about the cheetah!\n\nThe cheetah moves fast and can zigzag at the same time:\n\n\n\nBaby cheetahs have silvery manes on their backs:\n\n\n\nCheetahs and dogs get along well in captivity:\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\n\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\n\nThis week we\u2019re talking about cheetahs! This is a suggestion from Wyatt, and it\u2019s also an animal I\u2019ve had on my list to cover for a long time.\n\nYou may think the cheetah is just another big cat, but it\u2019s different from other felids in some interesting ways. It\u2019s most closely related to the puma, also called the cougar, and to the jaguarundi, both of which live in the Americas, but the Cheetah mostly lives in Africa. It was once also common throughout parts of Asia, but there are probably fewer than 50 Asiatic cheetahs left alive in the wild today.\n\nThe cheetah\u2019s genetic profile shows a bottleneck that occurred about 12,000 years ago. That means the worldwide population of cheetahs dropped so low that it became inbred, which lowered its genetic variability. This is about the same time that a lot of animals went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene, so we\u2019re very lucky the cheetah survived. Since it migrated into Africa about 12,000 years ago, it\u2019s possible that it only survived because it found the right combination of habitat and prey animal at just the right time. The cheetah\u2019s genetic profile actually shows another bottleneck that happened around 100,000 years ago, which researchers think may have occurred as it migrated across Asia. Whatever caused these genetic bottlenecks, the result is that all cheetahs are genetically nearly identical.\n\nOrdinarily, low genetic diversity means an animal is vulnerable to disease and infection due to a weak immune system. But cheetahs hardly ever get sick in the wild. A long-term study of cheetahs on protected land in Namibia found that zero of the 300 cheetahs showed symptoms of infection or disease. The team studying the cheetahs captured some of the cheetahs long enough to perform immunological tests on them\u2014which didn\u2019t hurt them\u2014and compared the results with those of leopards also living in the region. They found that while the leopards had a stronger overall immune system, the cheetahs had a much stronger initial immune response.\n\nThe cheetah is tan or yellowish with a white belly and throat. It has black spots over most of its body, and partial or complete rings at the end of its long tail. It has black streaks on its face called tear streaks since they start at the inner corner of the eyes and trace down the sides of the nose and over the cheeks. No other felid has tear streaks, and some researchers think it may help the cheetah see better in bright sunlight.\n\nThe cheetah has a small head, long legs, and a long tail and stands about three feet tall, or 90 cm. Its tail is almost as long as it is tall. It\u2019s lightly built. In fact, you might say it\u2019s built for speed.\n\nBecause, of course, the cheetah is the fastest land animal alive. The fastest cheetah ever reliably clocked ran at 70 mph, or 112 km/hour. That\u2019s as fast as a car racing down the interstate. Of course, the cheetah can\u2019t keep up that pace for very long, but it can run at around 40 mph, or 64 km/hour, for longer. It has the real-life equivalent of a turbo button in some video games. If it\u2019s chasing an antelope, which is mostly what it eats, and it\u2019s close but not gaining, it hits that turbo speed and zoom! It accelerates long enough to catch the antelope. And it only needs about two seconds to reach its maximum speed. Not only that, it can run that fast while twisting and turning through brush, since antelopes also switch direction frequently to try to outmaneuver the cheetah.\n\nWyatt specifically wants to know how cheetahs run, and it\u2019s definitely worth going into. The cheetah is incredibly well-adapted for high-speed hunting. It looks more like a greyhound than a big cat,