Cheetah

A cheetah emerges from tall grass in the Serengeti but finds only dust - a gazelle's alarm call triggered herd-wide flight within three seconds. Cheetahs rely on surprise for successful hunts; once detected, their success rate plummets. This creates evolutionary pressure for prey alarm systems: calling signals "I've detected you," and cheetahs often abandon pursuit to avoid wasting energy on alert prey.

But when prey doesn't detect them early, cheetahs become the fastest land animal, reaching 110+ km/h in short bursts while pursuing Thomson's gazelles capable of 80+ km/h and exceptional agility. This is evolutionary arms race dynamics: slow gazelles get eaten, removing their genes; cheetahs that can't catch gazelles starve. Reciprocal selection has produced increasingly sophisticated speed adaptations on both sides without either consistently winning. Yet cheetahs conserve their limited energy through signal interpretation - they selectively abandon pursuit of stotting gazelles (which signal high fitness) in favor of those running normally.

The cheetah's speed comes from extreme specialization: relatively long, slender limbs optimized for velocity at the cost of structural strength. This demonstrates scaling constraints - larger cursorial animals must sacrifice speed for strength, and no terrestrial animal over one ton can gallop. The business lesson: extreme optimization creates spectacular capability in narrow conditions but imposes severe constraints. Speed and strength are fundamentally incompatible at scale.