The study co-authors emphasized that their findings require follow-up research, and that a zebra's stripes likely serve multiple purposes. Flies seem to struggle to recognize striped surfaces, but scientists have not quite figured out why this is, Caro told Live Science. "It's kind of the last color that you would want."Ĭaro said regions with warmer, wetter climates are particularly susceptible to several species of disease-carrying flies other than the tsetse fliesthat the team considered in their study, and that the relationship the researchers found may actually be a function of fly avoidance, not thermoregulation. "I don't think that you would want to have a lot of black hairs along the top of your back if you wanted to try to keep cool," said Tim Caro, a professor of wildlife biology at the University of California, Davis, who studies zebra stripes but was not involved in the new study. Still, the researchers have not experimentally tested the theory that black and white stripes may generate small-scale breezes over a zebra's body, and some researchers don't think stripes can actually create this effect. The team found that the plains zebras with the most-defined torso stripes generally lived in the Northern, equatorial region of their range, whereas those with less-defined torso stripes were more common in the Southern, cooler regions of the range - a finding that supports the thermoregulation explanation. "An additional cooling mechanism could be very useful under these circumstances." "Zebra have a need to keep foraging throughout the day, which keeps them out in the open more of the time than other animals," Larison told Live Science. As such, zebras need to spend longer periods of time out in the heat of the midday sun, eating more food. Other animals also need to regulate body temperature, or thermoregulate, Larison pointed out, but zebras may especially benefit from an extra cooling system because they digest food much less efficiently than other grazers in Africa. "And other animals get bitten by flies, and they don't have stripes, either." "This wall we kept hitting up against was, 'Well, why do zebra have to have stripes for predation? Other animals have predators, and they don't have stripes,'" said study co-author Ren Larison, a researcher in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA. 13) in the journal Royal Society Open Science. These findings suggest that torso stripes may do more to help zebras regulate their body temperature than to avoid predators and tsetse flies, the team reported Tuesday (Jan. The scientists found that the definition of stripes along a zebra's back most closely correlated with temperature and precipitation in a zebra's environment, and did not correlate with the prevalence of lions or tsetse flies in the region. Now, researchers based at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have produced one of the most comprehensive zebra stripe studies yet by examining how 29 different environmental variables influence the stripe styles of plains zebras at 16 different sites from south to central Africa.
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