Tiny Chameleon’s Tongue Among the Most Powerful Machines on Earth

Anderson, who has been interested in chameleons since childhood, took a closer look at the tiniest chameleon species, which are not as well studied because they’re rarer and harder to catch than bigger chameleons.

When the lizard struck, Dr Anderson could measure the distance the tongue went, the elapsed time, and the speed and the acceleration at any given time.

But in the course of sticking out its tongue to 2.5 times its own body length, at a peak acceleration of 486 metres per second squared, it generates the highest yet measured acceleration and power output per kilogram of muscle mass of any reptile, bird, or mammal: 14,040 watts per kilogram. “And that’s what’s happening during tongue projection in chameleons: They get such high performance because the muscles are loading energy into elastic tissues before they actually project the tongue”.

The recoil of those tissues greatly increases the power of the muscle when catching its prey.

Masters of camouflage, chameleons are also some of the fastest vertebrates in the world.

Brown University postdoctoral researcher Christopher Anderson wanted to figure out just how powerful a chameleon’s tongue can be.

Like all small animals, tiny chameleons need to consume more energy per body weight to survive.

Anderson was not able to test the smallest known chameleon, which lives in Madagascar, because it is protected and can not be collected. And while all chameleons have the same catapult-like apparatus for launching the tongue, smaller chameleons have ones that are larger proportional to their size. A study of chameleons’ stretchy tongues has found that smaller species, some the size of your thumb, can hurl their sticky lickers with blazing-fast accelerations – up to 264 times the force of gravity.

However, most previous studies on the physics of chameleon tongues had been conducted on larger species. “These findings show that examining movements in smaller animals may expose movements harboring cryptic power amplification mechanisms and illustrate how varying metabolic demands may help drive morphological evolution”.

“This variation could mean that some of the most impressive statistics on chameleon feeding performance have been underestimated due to sampling bias, and more importantly that our understanding of how variation in the ecology and physiology of these animals relates to their organismal performance may be incomplete”, wrote the study authors. The predatory mantis shrimp, for example, can accelerate its hammerlike claw as fast as a 0.22-caliber bullet exiting a gun, according to research published in June 2012 in the journal Science. In a new study, Anderson shows just how fast chameleons can grab a cricket. Longbow archers have to load the energy into an arrow shaft by pulling the string and bending the bow before releasing the arrow. He recorded them at 3,000 frames per second.

The lead researcher used very sensitive high-speed camera to record 55 chameleons ranging from 1.6 to 7.8 inches, all belonging to 22 different species.

“I was just blown away by just how high a performance there is in these guys”, Anderson says.