Wildlife Go for Gold

The 2024 Summer Olympics holds 32 different sports with 206 Olympic national teams vying for gold, but how would North American wildlife stack up against top athletes? Learn if a 1600-pound mammal could beat Michael Phelps' max swimming speed, the crazy deep-diving world record set by a whale, the leaps and bounds of a small but mighty mantid, and if mountain goats are the true speed climbing G.O.A.T.

Swimming

Did you know there are 35 swimming events in the 2024 Summer Olympics? If they allowed fish to compete, sailfish-one of, if not the fastest fish in the world-would earn a lot of gold medals (move over Michael Phelps, although they would prefer squid, but alas). Found in tropical and temperate oceans around the world, scientists estimate they can reach speeds of over 30 mph (for reference, Phelps' max speed was 8.8 mph).

To make things fair, we should compare a land animal, amiright? When it comes to long distances, despite their size, moose can compete with the best of them. Weighing up to 1600 pounds, they have been recorded swimming up to 20 miles in between islands when looking for vegetation, and can even use this technique to avoid predators like wolves. For reference, the longest swimming race in the Olympics is 10 kilometers and the record time is around 2 hours (just keep swimming, just keep swimming).

Fun Fact: Moose have specialized nasal muscles that help close their nostrils while foraging underwater (take that snorkels).

Athletics

From pole vaults to high jumps, to relays and sprints-athletics (or track and field as we know it in the U.S.) is what many first think of when the Olympics are mentioned. They are also the oldest Olympic category, with roots in the very first ancient Greek Olympic games in 776 B.C.E. Did you know that those first games were even held in the Greek valley of Olympia?

Humans aren't the only quick and agile species-mantids could outjump the best Olympian! These species also have their own roots in Greek language: "mantis" means "soothsayer" in Greek and is a reference to their deceivingly docile posture where they hold their front legs together as if in prayer (hence the common name, praying mantis).

There are over 2,400 species of mantises around the world. While the most common species in the U.S. today were introduced from Europe and Asia, there are species of native mantids in North America like the Carolina mantid.

Mantids are carnivorous and are known for lying in wait to quickly pounce on their prey. Studies and high-speed footage have revealed that mantids use incredible reflexes to leap, rotate, and land precisely on their targets. They can calculate their approach, jump, and grab onto their prey in a matter of milliseconds. Good luck breaking that record to this year's hurdlers!

Diving

We love to watch the Summer Olympics diving competitions: the divers are strong, graceful, precise, and practiced. No doubt the competitors have spent years-decades, even-perfecting their form and learning breath control. Many marine animals have innate deep-diving instincts as well. Picture a fur seal, penguin, or polar bear launching into ice-cold water in search of their next meal. But the deepest diving marine animal of them all? The Cuvier's beaked whale.

Sometimes called the "goose-beaked whale", this reclusive mammal lives in the open ocean in temperate, tropical, and subtropical waters. Even though it is not considered to be threatened or endangered, population numbers are low. Some species are just not abundant by nature and that's okay!

One Cuvier's whale reportedly dove nearly two miles and another stayed submerged for over two hours-winning this species the records for both deepest and longest dives. Hopefully there are no humans attempting to break that record!

Speed Climbing

This year, 2024 Olympian and U.S. athlete Sam Watson set a new world record in speed climbing, which will be in the 2024 Paris Olympics as its own discipline for the first time. His record-15 meters in 4.798 seconds. With a women's world record of 6.242 seconds on the same route, Ola Miroslaw isn't far behind.

The sport of speed climbing involves two athletes racing side by side on the exact same 15-meter route (that they have practiced thousands of times) to see who can get to the top faster. Speed will have its own medal at the Paris games this year, and American Sam Watson is a favorite for the gold.

Another U.S. native is pretty fast at climbing, too. A mountain goat (Oreamnos americanus) can scale almost 1,500 vertical feet in 20 minutes. Their hooves have two toes that can move independently of each other and are specially designed for gripping to slippery, rocky terrain.

So who would win - a speed climber or a mountain goat? While goats are fast, Olympians are faster. Extrapolating a 5-second speed run to a 1,500-foot vertical cliff (this isn't how it works at all), it would take a speed climber just about 2.5 minutes to scale what a mountain goat can do in 20 minutes.