What Animals You Can’t Outrun Even in 3 Minutes

And they’re off! The Nile Crocodile easily out-swims the hippo. They’re swimming upstream against a heavy current, but the croc’s body is built for swimming through rough water. It weighs as much as 2 refrigerator freezers and is thought to be the heaviest reptile on Earth. It can swim up to 22 miles per hour.

The hippo can’t swim, not really, it just walks on the bottom of the river and pushes off from any big rock it finds. It can close its nostrils whenever it wants, to be able to glide a bit through the water, but it’s no match for the croc.

The crocodile reaches the shore and starts running through a field. But better make way, the hippo’s catching up, it’s speeding across the flat terrain. Even though it’s huge, a hippo can out-sprint a human! The croc was miles ahead, but the hippo was faster on foot. The hippo breaks through the ribbon! It’s all over!

Meep-meep. Hey there, roadrunner. Whatcha running from? Wait. Hold everything. That coyote is catching up fast. He’s right on your tail! The Greater Roadrunner can run up to 20 miles per hour, even faster when it’s really hungry. Despite what you see in cartoons, a coyote is actually twice as fast as a roadrunner. But the cartoon version is way funnier!

In lane 1, from the dense jungles of South America, the ever-slow sloth. And right underneath him in lane 2, we have a typical garden snail. And.... The... race.... Is.... On.... For the slowest animal on Earth. With the sloth’s top speed clocking in at 0.2 miles per hour it’s no wonder they call it a giant moving pillow. Well, I call them that. The snail’s off to a good start. It can cover a small neighborhood in about an hour. This boneless creature has only one foot, which is covered in a protective slime.

It’s too blurry to see, but I think the sloth is... still in the same spot. And now it’s asleep. It’ll probably be asleep throughout the whole race, a sloth can snooze it up for 15 hours a day! It’s asleep for more than half its life! And look, the snail got out of that sunny patch, next stop, a shady patch. It’s too close to call. We’ll have to wait till the sloth wakes up to get back to this race.

A grizzly bear can easily outrun a human. If you’re at a picnic, and you cook up something a little too yummy...better leave your lunch behind! The fastest a human can sprint is 28 miles per hour, set of course by Usain Bolt. So he’d probably be able to run away in time. If you’re slower than him, which you are, then you’re in trouble! In a one-on-one sprint between a human and a grizzly bear, you’re gonna be the bear’s lunch every time. But out of all the bears, which one’s the fastest?

Polar bears, Grizzly bears, brown bears, sun bears, and the cute cuddly panda bear. On your marks. Get set. Go! The tension is palpable. The Grizzly and the Brown bear are claw-to-claw. A Brown bear can easily run as fast as a Grizzly. The Sun bear is the smallest bear in the race. It’s about 6 feet long, or tall, or whatever. It just can’t keep up. The Polar bear got off to a great start, but it just doesn’t have the speed of the Grizzly or Brown bear. Grizzly takes the lead. No, it’s the Brown bear. Now Grizzly. Wait where’s Panda?

What’s it doing? I don’t think it knows it’s in a race, but isn’t it cute? It just finished its 3rd bamboo stick. A Panda bear can eat up to 28 pounds of bamboo a day! That’s like...a lot! But it’s off. It found a shortcut and is rolling down that hill! It zooms past the Grizzly and the Brown bear. It’s all over, Panda wins! Sorry bears. We all know that the panda isn’t exactly fast. It’s actually one of the slowest bears. Still, if you see a panda rolling down the hill in your direction, run!

A Boeing 747 has a top speed of around 620 miles per hour. The fastest bird is the Grey-Headed Albatross. It can fly up to 80 miles per hour and stay up there for about 10 hours without landing. The Peregrine Falcon is faster, but only when it’s diving straight down to grab some take-out. Watch out pigeon! Wow! Big planes take a long time to get up in the air, but the Albatross? It’s up and off in a few seconds, it’s in the lead! But a few minutes later...

Back to slo-mo-ville, the sloth’s awake, that’s good. But so far it’s only managed to lift its arm to reach that tree branch. The garden snail’s still trying to get past that big rock. Sloths spend a lot of their time as motionless as possible, so that they don’t become someone else’s breakfast. Not great training for a race.

But hold on! Player 3 has entered the race! It’s the Galapagos Tortoise. Its powerful front legs carry this tank of an animal...it’s a whopping 4 times faster than the garden snail. This just got interesting. We got ourselves the race that’ll last a century! The tortoise is running and dodging every obstacle. Nothing can stop it. Hey no cheating sloth. Don’t be dropping tree branches from up there...

Deep underground, a mole’s busy burrowing around. A mole can eat as many earthworms as its own body weight and can dig around 15 feet per hour. The American badger is the fastest-digging animal in the world and is surprisingly fast on land. It can almost match the speed of a human, on a good day. Head to head, the American badger wins the tunnel race pretty easily. Too bad the mole can’t see where it’s going. Moles aren’t really blind, they just have terrible eyesight, and they’re colorblind. And they can’t wear glasses down there.

The proud cheetah. It’s sprinting across the savannah at warp speed “I’ve been the fastest land mammal for millions of years. I got this.” The fastest cheetah on record was a sprinter named Sarah. When she was 11, she ran the 100 meters in under 6 seconds! A cheetah can run at up to 80 miles per hour if it sees something tasty. Sarah was raised in an American zoo and was one of the first cheetahs to have a puppy buddy when she was growing up. Alexa and Sarah, friends forever!

But soaring above Sarah is a humble little bat. And that bat is making Sarah look slow. The Brazilian Free-tailed Bat can hit 100 miles per hour, it’s the fastest mammal on the planet. Now, time for some shrinking. First to the blocks is the Australian Tiger Beetle. It charges forward at 6 miles per hour. That may not seem like much, but relative to its size, it’s lightning-fast. That’s like a human running alongside a high-speed train!

Running in the inside lane is the Saharan Silver Ant. Ants are team players and are strongest when they’re working together. But even one ant can be amazingly strong. An ant can lift hundreds of times its own weight and can sprint like there’s no tomorrow. Usain Bolt can hit 4 strides per second, this Silver Ant does 50! Scientists even discovered that these little ants like to gallop once they reach their top speed!

Our last contender. The fastest animal on Earth. It’s none other than this tiny mite. It’s only the size of a sesame seed! If we go by body lengths per second, this microscopic animal outruns everything else on the planet. It’s believed to run almost twice as fast as the Tiger Beetle, and if it were human size, it would run faster than the speed of sound!

Let’s get back to the crawlers... they finish yet? The tortoise is in the lead. The snail finally got past that large rock and the sloth is on its way to branch number 2. The tortoise is 3 feet away from the finish line! Wow. I just can’t take much more of this excitement, but I think I have time for a latte.