Why’d the zebra evolve its stripes? Perhaps because stripes seem to keep off horseflies, a new study suggests. There’s good evolutionary reason to escape the ravages of horseflies, at least for horses and their relatives; though flies are just annoying pests from the human perspective, horsefly-bitten horses can grow skinny and have trouble producing milk for their young. And as soon as baby-making is affected by something in the environment, adaptation isn’t far behind.
Other research has shown that horseflies prefer to land on black horses instead of white, which got Gabor Horvath, author of the recent study, thinking about how they’d react to black-and-white specimens, such as zebras. Of course, actual zebras can be hard to experiment on, as The Economist notes in an article on the research:
[Real zebras] insist on moving around and swishing their tails. The team therefore conducted their study using inanimate objects. Some were painted uniformly dark or uniformly light, and some had stripes of various widths. Some were plastic trays filled with salad oil (to trap any insect that landed). Some were glue-covered boards. And some were actual models of zebra. They put these objects in a field infested with horseflies and counted the number of insects they trapped.
The first thing they found was that just as light patches attracted fewer flies than dark, striped patches attracted even fewer than uniform colors. And the striped pattern that had the fewest flies had stripes the width of zebra stripes. This suggests that zebra stripes may be especially good at keeping the flies off. But why is that? The Economist again:
Dr Horvath thinks it might be related to a horsefly’s ability to see polarised light, which imposes a sense of horizontal and vertical on an image. Horseflies are known to prefer horizontal polarised light. Possibly, the mostly vertical stripes on a zebra confuse the fly’s tiny brain and thus stop it seeing the animal.
So for some creatures, horseflies included, orienting stripes a certain way can make things invisible. Makes you wonder, what out there is invisible to us, because of our own sight limitations? We already know that many organisms can see ultraviolet light, inhabiting a world with more colors than we do and lots more unusual bird and butterfly patterns. Additionally, as optical illusions prove, we see all kinds of stuff that isn’t really there.
Though it’s hard to feature missing a giant mammal in your path, science has shown that humans as well as flies can do it (though for different, more complicated reasons). Try it for yourself here.
Image courtesy of chaouki / flickr
February 10th, 2012 at 1:13 pm
Now I know why LMFAO are so fond of zebra patterned party rock pants. All that partying is bound to attract flies. :D
February 11th, 2012 at 7:21 pm
And I quote, “though flies are just annoying pests from the human perspective”. And a cat is a fuzzy, purry thing that likes to sleep on your lap, a tiger is a cat, therefore … . Not really, a (Western US) horsefly is about twice as long as the biggest housefly and has very sharp and powerful jaws that draws blood when one bites your horse (they have really thick skin). Being bitten by a horsefly is very unpleasant. It reminds me of being stung by a wasp.
February 11th, 2012 at 8:49 pm
My horses spend most of there time grazing with their heads down near the ground like the zebra that you see in the picture. I assume the zebras do too. My horses get fly-bitten mostly on the legs and face. Note that the zebra’s legs are horizontally stripped and their heads would present as horizontally stripped in the grazing position. Hmm… Of course my horses haven’t tried using striped cardboard trays, so there might be something to that.
February 11th, 2012 at 9:54 pm
Another great product brought to you by God! Enjoy thousands of other great features like this throughout the world!
February 12th, 2012 at 5:10 am
WHOAAAAA there pardners,,,, seems like in junior high school i larnt that flies have an eyeball with 80 prisms per eye or there abouts, maybe, just MAYBE, they see the zebra and are tricked into seeing one giant as* horse of a different stripe. (a water filled zip lock baggie stapled to an open door looks closed to the pesky fly thereby keeping most of them out). maybe too, the look of so large and many a stripe gives them an headache and causes seasickness like symptoms, causing said horsefly flight equlibriumosis (what a cool word i just invented) and plum misses the landing on said zebras.
February 13th, 2012 at 8:45 am
No idea what you’re on about mate.