It’s not quite faster than a speeding bullet, but Rhampholeon spinosus can flick its tongue faster than a launching space shuttle, a new study has shown

Research has identified the tiny chameleon Rhampholeon spinosus as having the ultimate high-speed mouthful. When it flicks its tongue at a fly, it reaches peak acceleration 264 times the force of gravity.

As a comparison, Nasa’s shuttle delivered astronauts into orbit with a peak acceleration of only 3g. The F-16 jet fighter only reaches 7g in pulling out of a dive. The best-trained pilots and astronauts lose consciousness at 9g. Crash a car into a brick wall at 60 mph and you’ll experience a fatal 100g.

The smallest invertebrate creatures – for instance a jumping flea or a biting ant - manage much higher acceleration. The chameleon may be small, but the acceleration of its tongue is the equivalent of getting from 0 to 60mph in a hundredth of a second. The chameleon needs only two hundredths of a second to catch a cricket..

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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. The winner was a tiny reptile 47mm in length. It was second only to the most powerful vertebrate tongue of all, that of an amphibian, a salamander. The lesson is that small can outperform big.

“Smaller species have higher performance than larger species,” says Christopher Anderson of Brown University in the US, who reveals in the journal Scientific Reports that to establish the champion chameleon’s tongue-lashing power he had to film 279 cases of 55 individuals from 20 different species within nine genera, taking tethered insects in front of a camera that could shoot 3,000 frames a second.

He found that the smaller the chameleon, the higher the relative power and the distance of the tongue extension relative to body size. A species two feet long Furcifer oustaletti, could manage a peak acceleration of only 18% of that of the champion.

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The trick is in how the power is stored: the chameleon’s mouthful of ballistic missile is pre-loaded. Longbow archers have to load the energy into an arrow shaft by pulling the string and bending the bow before releasing the arrow. Crossbowmen crank up the tension first and keep their bolts at full tension for trigger release. The tiny chameleon – smaller than a human thumb – preloads most of the total energy into the tongue’s elastic tissue. Recoil augments muscle power and takes the prey with greater certainty.

The evolutionary argument for putting more power into tiny packages is that small creatures need to consume more energy per bodyweight just to stay alive. Dr Anderson’s paper concludes that smaller creatures may harbour cryptic “power amplification mechanisms and illustrate how varying metabolic demands may help drive morphological evolution”. In other words, he says “What this study shows is that by using smaller species, we may be able to elucidate these higher performance values.”

• This article was amended on 6 January 2016. An earlier version said 20 milliseconds was a fifth of one hundredth of a second. In fact it is two hundredths of a second.