Averaging Bite Forces

Have you heard the whole “a finger can be bit off as easily as biting into a carrot” myth that sometimes floats around? (It’s especially common with kids fascinated by this sort of stuff.)

Jaw strength is quite an interesting thing when you look into it. For example, it’s measured by pounds per square inch, and the human molar is typically where our bite force is strongest.

So, if you had to guess what the average bite strength of an adult human was, what would you place your number around? 20 pounds? 50? 120 pounds? Try 200. That seems like an awful lot of force, doesn’t it? That’s like an adult American male sitting on a single spot that is 1 inch wide and 1 inch long.

Yeah, that’s how it works. But when you really start to think about how hard your siblings would bite down on your hand or arm when you were younger and everyone fought with one another, it starts to make a little sense. I mean, someone biting you with force really hurts. So, of course a 200 pound man sitting on a very small area would really hurt. It kind of adds up.

What gets really interesting, however, is when you start looking into the bite force of other animals. How do you think we compare?

Well, it probably comes as no surprise that we have one of the weaker bite forces out of the animal kingdom.

For land animals, you’d probably be making good guesses if you said lions or tigers (1000 PSI) had some of the most powerful bites. And surely some of you guessed that grizzly or polar bears (~1200 PSI) was the winner.

But if you consider it a “land” animal, well, the Nile crocodile wins by a long shot with a 5000 PSI bite force. For reference, that’s 25 times stronger than an average human’s bite force. No wonder they’re considered some of the most dangerous and fearsome predators in the world.

Now, great white sharks are estimated to have an even stronger bite force than Nile crocs, but there has never been a true test to measure the “strongest” bite force ever on a great white. Theoretically, though, they may just be our winners.

So when you think about biting down on something as hard as you can, humans are relatively good at grinding and piercing what we need to when going at a piece of steak. One of the closer bite forces to ours that is also a companion to us is domesticated dogs. For example, pitbulls have around 225 PSI bite forces. Typically, we would regard pitbulls as a very muscular and sometimes vicious dog, so the fact that our bite force is close to theirs shows we’re nothing of a chump in the bite department.