Regarding social benefits, rates of grooming and patterns of association are no greater in striped equids than in unstriped equids. Regarding confusion of predators, zebras do not have the sort of striping pattern that aids in confusion and African lions take zebra prey disproportionately more than expected suggesting an absence of confusion effect.
Briefly, regarding camouflage, zebra stripes are difficult for lion Panthera leo and spotted hyaena Crocuta crocuta predators to resolve at any great distance making crypsis against mammalian predators an unlikely benefit. The function of zebra stripes has been a source of scientific interest for over 150 years generating many hypotheses including camouflage, confusion of predators, signaling to conspecifics, thermoregulation and avoidance of biting flies but contemporary data show that only one stands up to careful scrutiny. As a consequence of zebras’ striping, very few tabanids successfully landed on zebras and, as a result of zebras’ changeable behaviour, few stayed a long time, or probed for blood.
#Dark zebra vs zebra 2 skin#
To counteract flies, zebras swished their tails and ran away from fly nuisance whereas horses showed higher rates of skin twitching. Taken together, these findings indicate that, up close, striped surfaces prevented flies from making a controlled landing but did not influence tabanid behaviour at a distance. In separate, detailed video analyses, tabanids approached zebras faster and failed to decelerate before contacting zebras, and proportionately more tabanids simply touched rather than landed on zebra pelage in comparison to horses. In an experiment in which horses sequentially wore cloth coats of different colours, those wearing a striped pattern suffered far lower rates of tabanid touching and landing on coats than the same horses wearing black or white, yet there were no differences in attack rates to their naked heads. Observations showed that fewer tabanids landed on zebras than on horses per unit time, although rates of tabanid circling around or briefly touching zebra and horse pelage did not differ. We examined the behaviour of tabanids (horse flies) in the vicinity of captive plains zebras and uniformly coloured domestic horses living on a horse farm in Britain.
#Dark zebra vs zebra 2 driver#
Averting attack by biting flies is increasingly regarded as the evolutionary driver of zebra stripes, although the precise mechanism by which stripes ameliorate attack by ectoparasites is unknown.
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