Shitty Ask Science

African, or European?

Calculate the air speed of a swallow, naturally select the local variant, then replace the density of air with the density of water.

It's surprisingly tricky. You're going to need the mass, cross-sectional area, and the Reynolds number of it's form, then you need to consider launch angle, relese velocity, and how it deforms under acceleration and the air resistance, it's angle and speed of rotation, and probably many other characteristics. After that the calculations are non-trivial.

Alternatively just yeet a (model of a) sea anemone and measure the reulting velocity. If any asks what you are doing, yell "SCIENCE!!" and stare at them until they back off. A Nobel prize is almost assured.

None of us have seen any money to say for certain.

Great question. There exists a univeral speed limit 'c', from which the c-anemone gets its name. You can derive the expected speed by dividing the speed of light (c) by the refractive index of the medium.

The refractive index of air at sea level is 1.00027717. Because it's 'air speed velocity' and 'c-level'.

Dividing out we get 299709km/sec.

It’s one anemometer per anemosecond—the hard part is converting experiential anemone metrics to human ones.

Put it in a potato cannon, get two optic eye beams, record the time as the anemone flies through each beam. Tricky to get the path right, I am sure, trial and error will help. Then, time in seconds, say from an internal clock on whatever device gets the signal from the beams. So b1 is beam one, and the first the anemone passes through, then you have b2 for beam two. Measure the distance (d) in feet between the beams along the flight path. So, t1 is time b1 triggers, t2 for b2 trigger. Elapsed time, et, is t2-t1. Velocity is d/et, giving feet per second.