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Cheetah

Acinonyx jubatus · medium

A cheetah is a cat rebuilt for acceleration at the cost of nearly everything else. The spine flexes like a spring, extending the stride; the claws are only semi-retractable and function as sprinting spikes; enlarged nasal passages, heart and lungs feed the effort. It reaches speeds no other land animal matches, but only for a few hundred metres, after which it must stop and recover.

That recovery is the vulnerable moment. A cheetah is light-boned and not built to fight, and lions, hyenas and even vultures regularly take kills from it while it is still catching its breath. Losing prey to larger carnivores is a routine cost of the strategy.

The species also carries strikingly low genetic diversity, consistent with a severe population bottleneck in the distant past. Skin grafts between unrelated individuals are accepted rather than rejected — a result that startled researchers and points to how similar the animals are genetically.

Most cheetahs live in southern and eastern Africa, largely outside protected areas, which brings them into conflict with farmers. A separate and much smaller Asiatic population survives in Iran, reduced to a number low enough that every individual is significant.

Where it lives

Worml lists the cheetah as native to 11 countries — Botswana, Chad, Ethiopia, Iran, Kenya, Namibia, Niger, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Its habitat is open savanna, grassland and semi-desert.

Ranges here are reduced to whole countries for playability and exclude introduced populations — see about the data for what that simplification leaves out.

In the game

Cheetah is rated medium. To solve the round you need to find any 6 of its 11 listed countries. How scoring works →

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