![]() ![]() Investigating how horse flies behave around horses wearing different colored coats. “Consequently, far fewer successful landings were experienced by zebras compared to horses.”īy analyzing videos of the flies interacting with the zebras and horses included in the experiment, the researchers discovered that flies decelerated prior to landing on horses but approached zebras at faster speeds and failed to slow down as they got close to the animals, causing the flies to simply bump into the zebras and fly away again. “Horse flies just seem to fly over zebra stripes or bump into them, but this didn’t happen with horses,” Caro said in a statement about the new research. “In summary, the zebra cloth coat had beneficial effects for the horse but the naked head suffered the same frequency of landings by tabanids,” the researchers write in the study. They found that flies landed far less often on the striped coat, but just as often on the uncovered heads of the horses. In order to rule out zebras’ different smells and movements compared to horses as the potential fly-deterring mechanism, the researchers placed a striped coat on several horses and observed the results. They found no significant difference in the rate at which flies circled and even touched zebras compared to uniformly colored horses held in similar enclosures, but they did discover that the flies successfully landed on the zebras far less frequently. Photo Credit: School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol.Ĭaro, How, and team conducted a series of experiments in order to observe the behaviors of horseflies when they attempted to prey on captive zebras and domestic horses at a livery in North Somerset, England. Professor Tim Caro observing zebra behavior in response to biting fly annoyance. Their results are detailed in a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE las week. “Again and again, there was greater striping on areas of the body in those parts of the world where there was more annoyance from biting flies.”įinding the answer to how zebras got their stripes only leads to another question: How exactly do stripes help zebras avoid biting insects? Caro and Martin How of the UK’s University of Bristol led a new study to examine how stripes might deter biting flies as they attempt to land on zebras. “I was amazed by our results,” Caro said in a statement when the research was released. Through their analysis, the researchers were able to rule out every theory for the origin of zebra stripes except one: the stripes help the animals deter blood-sucking flies. The team then looked at where the animals’ geographic ranges overlapped with a number of different environmental variables, such as woodland areas where the stripes might camouflage the animals, the ranges of large predators, temperatures, and the geographic distributions of glossinids and tabanids. ![]() Tim Caro, a professor of wildlife biology at the University of California, Davis, led a research team that mapped the geographic distributions of seven different species of zebras, horses, and asses that have stripes of various intensities on different parts of their bodies. Theories have held that a zebra’s stripes might provide camouflage or are otherwise helpful in disrupting predatory attacks, that they are a means of thermal regulation for the animals, or that they might have some social function.Ī 2014 study might have finally supplied the answer, however, concluding that biting flies like glossinids (tsetse flies) and tabanids (horseflies) appear to be the “evolutionary driver” of the zebra’s stripes. Scientists have long wondered why zebras wear striped coats - none other than Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin are known to have debated the question well over a century ago. Tim Caro, a professor of wildlife biology at the University of California, Davis in the US, and Martin How, a researcher at the University of Bristol in the UK, led a new study to examine how stripes might deter biting flies as they attempt to land on zebras.Finding the answer to how zebras got their stripes led to another question: How exactly do stripes help zebras avoid biting insects?.Scientists have long wondered why zebras wear striped coats and a 2014 study might have finally supplied the answer: biting flies like glossinids (tsetse flies) and tabanids (horseflies) appear to be the “evolutionary driver” of the zebra’s stripes.
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