The most interesting parts (to me): "By watching and filming the stable’s horses and zebras, the team confirmed that horseflies were much worse at alighting on

The most interesting parts (to me): "By watching and filming the stable’s horses and zebras, the team confirmed that horseflies were much worse at alighting on the latter. The flies had no problem finding the zebras or approaching them, but couldn’t stick the landing. “You get a quarter as many landings,” Caro said. “The flies just can’t probe for a blood meal with the zebras.” “When we looked at the videos, we found that the flies simply aren’t decelerating when they come in to the stripes,” Caro said. Either they miss and overshoot the zebras, or they bump into the hides and bounce off. Something’s clearly throwing them off, but the details are still a mystery. Caro said that they might treat the black stripes like a pair of trees, try to fly between them, and end up colliding with the white stripes. Alternatively, the stripes might mess with their optic flow—their sense of objects moving across their visual field.