To catch its next meal, a lion needs to be sneaky. It needs powerful legs to pounce on its prey. It needs sharp claws to wrestle the animal to the ground. But none of that matters if the lion can’t bite the prey hard enough. For lions and other meat-eating animals, a strong bite is key to survival.
Take a look at the animals above. Which do you think has the fiercest bite? That’s an important question to biologist Adam Hartstone-Rose. He studies the body structures of meat-eating animals to learn about their bite strength. He’s examined everything from tiny weasels to gigantic polar bears.
Hartstone-Rose doesn’t have living animals chomp down on a measuring device. Instead, he studies the jaws from animal specimens preserved in museums. He wants to use this information to learn about how an animal’s jaw is related to what it eats.
In general, Hartstone-Rose has found that bigger animals can bite with more force, or strength. That makes sense, since bigger animals have bigger jaw muscles. But Hartstone-Rose recently started wondering: what if size weren’t a factor? So he divided each animal’s bite force by its weight. This gave him their relative bite force—in other words, how powerful their bite is compared to how big they are.
You might be surprised to learn what he found. Keep reading to crunch the numbers for yourself!