The Mystery Behind Why Zebras Have Stripes

Morning Stripy!

You know Zebras?

Those stripy non-horses?

We had no idea why they had stripes until recently…

Lemme explain…

Imagine it’s 19th-century Africa.

The Europeans run the place, strutting around on their fancy Eurasian horses.

But there’s a problem…

The horses kept dying thanks to the biting insects, giving them diseases and stuff…

So the Europeans start looking to the native horse-like species for help, the Zebra.

This didn't work, of course, zebras are way too rowdy.

But it got colonial scientists interested.

They had a couple of theories.

For example:

But other very similar animals like horses have no problem identifying members of the same species, even if the patterns are super weird…

 So that theory has gotta be wrong.

But lions catch and kill zebras all the time.

If zebra stripes are meant to hide them from predators, they're clearly not doing a very good job.

Anyway, lions from a distance probably just see zebras as gray.

And if they get closer, they can just smell or hear them.

So, fast forward a 100 years or so, and we FINALLY figure something out.

They decide to test this hypothesis…

So they get a zebra, a horse, and a horse wearing a zebra-like rug.

They find that flies circle each animal at the same rate.

But for some reason, they land on the striped coats 1/4 as much!

But why?

Well, they also observe that the mosquitoes seem to fly into the stripes at higher speeds and just bounce off.

The theory is that because these insects have eyes that see like this:

The spacing of the stripes kinda messes with the flies' sense of positioning of the zebra.

Or in simple terms: the fly doesn't know how far away the zebra is!

Meaning it doesn't decelerate quickly enough and just… crashes.

Zebras are geniuses!

Stay Cute,
Reece, Henry & Dylan 🌈

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