4 ms·
Against colour blind predators, zebra stripes are pretty good camouflage. I suspect it is more to do with avoiding lions than mosquitoes.
by stubish 8y ago
Against colour blind predators, zebra stripes are pretty good camouflage. I suspect it is more to do with avoiding lions than mosquitoes.
- your-nanny 8y agowe tend to underestimate the evolutionary impact of parasites and disease. Mosquitos are a major vector; could very well be the mosquitos
- londons_explore 8y agoI can't imagine it would take long for mosquitoes to evolve to specifically gravitate towards stripes...
- your-nanny 8y agoWell it's hard to know what fitness terrain lay between the present phenotype and that one, so it's necessarily obvious bthat such an adaptation would occur. Nor is it obvious that stripe attraction is more adaptive. Could be hidden costs I'm not cognizant of. In any case, we were speaking of the zevras adaptation, not the mosquito's. If true that mosquitos are not attracted to striped things, it doesn't matter why zebras have stripes. What matters is the cost to mosquitoes presently incurred by missing out on all that zebra. Indeed, one wonders why mosquitos haven't adapted to the zebras stripes already...
- PavlikPaja 8y agoIt may be hard for their tiny brains to distinguish stripes from other things that are not animals.