Scientists are providing new evidence to answer the long-standing question about why zebras have stripes. It appears stripes make terrible landing strips, bamboozling the fierce blood-sucking flies that try to feast on zebras and carry deadly diseases.
Researchers on Wednesday described experiments demonstrating that horse flies have a difficult time landing on zebras while easily landing on uniformly colored horses. In one experiment, the researchers put cloth coats bearing striped patterns on horses and observed that fewer flies landed on them than when the same horses wore single-color coats.
"We showed that horse flies approach zebras and uniformly colored horses at similar rates but that they fail to land on zebras — or striped horse coats — because they fail to decelerate properly, and so fly past them or literally bump into them and bounce off," said behavioral ecologist Tim Caro of the University of California-Davis, lead author of the research published in the journal PLOS ONE.