![]() Baboon still barks fiercely at all, living high up among the rocks, holding his tail stiffly up to ease the stinging of his tender bald patches.įor a clever look into the meaning of color and the emotional and social impact color has on our lives, check out Jude Stewart’s Roy G. … From that day on, Zebra’s descendants, wondrously striped in black and white, have lived mainly in the great grassy plains of Africa. Meanwhile Zebra, unbalanced by the force of his kick, had staggered into Baboon’s fire, scorching his beautiful white hide, leaving him full of stripes from head to rump. Baboon landed so hard on the rough rocks that he was left with big, red, bald patches, where he had landed on his rump and they are still on his descendants to this day. With a huge kick, Zebra sent Baboon flying into the rocks of a nearby hill. Here’s how children’s book How the Zebra Got His Stripes: African Folk Tales by Cari Mostert describes the scene: The two animals fought in a battle that settled both of their most distinctive features. An all-white zebra stumbled upon a pool of water guarded by a pushy baboon, who refused to let the zebra drink. Whatever the final word of modern science on the subject, the facts rob none of the pleasure from African folk tales explaining the zebra’s stripes, including this one from the San tribe of Namibia. Zebras have even nailed the optimal stripe-width to repel flies, studies show. Zebra stripes, on the other hand, throw off the exact sort of polarized light that tabanids find repulsive. The bugs use polarized light to guide them to egg-laying sites-and solid-dark animals reflect polarized light like crazy. Zebra stripes repel horseflies nearly as well as all-white coloring. The takeaway? All-white animals repel horseflies best, although this coloring isn’t without collateral drawbacks, including increased risk of skin cancer, visual problems and attack by larger predators. They put all these objects in a field infested with horseflies and counted how many insects they trapped. Some were painted uniformly dark- or light-colored, and some sported stripes of various widths. In a series of studies between 20, a team of Hungarian and Swedish biologists decided to figure out why.įorgoing the difficulties of working with actual zebras, the scientists built a testing station on a Hungarian horsefarm using inanimate objects-specifically plastic trays of salad oils (to capture flies as they landed), glue-covered boards and fake zebra models. ![]() Tabanids require a blood meal before laying eggs, but get surprisingly finicky as to the animal’s coloring they prefer. ![]() Both qualify as zebra predators of a not-merely-irritating sort: The former causes sleeping sickness in zebras the latter reduces body fat and milk production in horses and grazing cattle. That last notion has gained traction lately among zoologists, whose research points an accusing zebra-striped finger at two members of the tabanid species, tsetse flies and horseflies. ![]() Zebra Stripes by Ruth Hartnup on Flickr: Evidence exists to suggest zebra stripes help regulate the animal’s body temperature or confuse predators. ![]() Other theories: Zebra stripes serve as displays of individual fitness (screwy stripes might indicate a less-than-robust potential mate) or as key to zebras’ social interaction (each zebra boasts a print unique to itself, like a body-sized fingerprint). As Darwin pointed out, zebras graze in open savannahs, not amid thick vegetation where their stripes could serve as decent camouflage. To debunk your first (likely) guess: It’s not about camouflage. Pattern fans, here’s today’s $64,000 question: How can we explain zebra stripes? Plausible theories abound dating most famously from a debate between Charles Darwin and fellow 19th-century biologist Alfred Russel Wallace. ![]()
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