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Zebras of all stripes repel biting flies at close range
- manmal 4y agoI thought this has been common knowledge for decades.
- Sharlin 4y agoLiterally the FIRST two sentences in the abstract: "The best-supported hypothesis for why zebras have stripes is that stripes repel biting flies. While this effect is well-established, the mechanism behind it remains elusive."
- protomyth 4y agoOur findings confirm that zebra stripes repel biting flies under naturalistic conditions and do so at close range Which has lead to suggestions to breed this into livestock. Which will certainly change the landscape in US. As I said before: Somehow driving through South Dakota looking out over a vast field of seaweed eating, zebra striped cows was not the future I anticipated as a youth.
- metadat 4y agoThe flies might still hang around for a slice of pie.
- justinpowers 4y agoStriped pie anyone?
- BurningFrog 4y agoOr a new rural profession of Cow Painter springs up!
- qbrass 4y agoNew-ish. https://www.npr.org/2020/08/23/905181717/study-finds-painting-eyes-on-cows-butts-can-save-their-lives https://www.npr.org/2020/08/23/905181717/study-finds-paintin...
- libertine 4y agoI have a question, due to the lack of diversity of food sources for flies, wouldn't that pressure de evolution of flies that ignore the stripes? Maybe there would be a decline in population first, then a rise of stripe seeing flies.
- zdragnar 4y agoBiting flies have all kinds of food sources- I live in an area of the midwest with no animal farms for several miles (lots of trees and water springs though) and the woods are so thick with deer flies that I can't take my dogs with on a walk- their ears will have 6 flies each before we get 50 feet. Deer, bears, coyote, wolves, raccoons, mice, otters, beaver, rats, muskrats, cougar, bobcats, chipmunks and squirrels, elk and moose, skunks, badgers, porcupines can all be found in nature in the upper midwest, along with various moles, voles, shrew and weasel family members can be found pretty much anywhere outside of a city center. Since deer fly (and other biting flies) typically need a bit of standing water to breed, they're going to be found pretty much anywhere mammals live. If they decide they don't like striped cows, there's going to be plenty of other options to munch on.
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoThat's fantastic. I so needed something that hit "I never knew that" and "not remotely connected to tech and jobs and mortgages". Well done World for funding simple scientific questions - not trying to fix the planet, just asking "why does that happen". Marvellous One (morbid) thought - I wonder if lions get bitten less when heads down in a black and white carcass?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fuzzfactor 4y agoNow that you mention "not remotely connected to tech" and "black and white" . . . I like the introduction section of this paper (basically speculating "How the Zebra Got His Stripes") as a modern descendant correcting some of the misconceptions from Rudyard Kipling's How the Leopard Got His Spots[0]. Especially a tale of an imaginary past when leopards and men had not yet been magically given their recognized colorings at the time. But Zebra and Giraffe already had the patterns we know today: Zebra moved away to some little thorn-bushes where the sunlight fell all stripy, and Giraffe moved off to some tallish trees where the shadows fell all blotchy. 'Now watch,' said the Zebra and the Giraffe. 'This is the way it's done. One—two—three! And where's your breakfast?' Leopard stared, and Ethiopian stared, but all they could see were stripy shadows and blotched shadows in the forest, but never a sign of Zebra and Giraffe. They had just walked off and hidden themselves in the shadowy forest. 'Hi! Hi!' said the Ethiopian. 'That's a trick worth learning. Take a lesson by it, Leopard. You show up in this dark place like a bar of soap in a coal-scuttle.' 'Ho! Ho!' said the Leopard. 'Would it surprise you very much to know that you show up in this dark place like a mustard-plaster on a sack of coals?' [0]Outdated literature not safe for all audiences, as always. https://www.owleyes.org/text/just-so-stories/read/how-the-leopard-got-his-spots#root-42 https://www.owleyes.org/text/just-so-stories/read/how-the-le...
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoI like the disclaimer Disney puts up on some of its streaming items - it's something like "This content stereotypes some peoples or cultures - it was wrong then and now but we are keeping it here as a historical document (and to spark conversation)" (If you have Disney+ go look for the original Dumbo)
- lttlrck 4y agoI need zebra patterned socks.
- WalterBright 4y agoI wonder why outdoor apparel makers don't make zebra striped clothing.
- atdrummond 4y agoZubaz?
- SoftTalker 4y agoSeems like I remember it being a short-lived trend in the 1980s?
- WalterBright 4y agoThe idea isn't trendiness, it's to reduce the mosquito bites.
- jabl 4y agoGood point. Maybe there's competition from alternative patternings. Like camouflage type patterns for hunters / preppers / military cosplayers. Or high-viz colors for people who worry about safety wrt. various kinds of accidents. Or just whatever the current per se meaningless trend colors are?
- bilsbie 4y agoMy idea (consider this public domain / prior art if no one has though of it) We introduce tree frogs or perhaps geckos or chameleons to live on cows. They would eat the flies and the body heat could probably keep them warm year round. They’d eventually breed themselves to adapt to the life cycle and be self perpetuating.
- osrec 4y agoOkay, but how would they live "on" cows? Just ride on a cow's back? It may be more bothersome to the cow than a few flies!
- bilsbie 4y agoYeah they’re really good at climbing so basically move all around. As I understand it the fly bites hurt a lot so I’d imagine they’d prefer a lizard but worth testing.
- bmitc 4y agoI recently learned this from BBC's Life in Colour documentary. It explained it, similar to the article (although the paper really dances around this hypothesis), that the flies had a hard time landing due to some visual weirdness from the stripes when the flies are close up. They had a lot of close-up footage of flies hovering above a zebra's skin but seemingly confused on how to land.
- SoftTalker 4y agoI wonder why, over the long term, the flies did not adapt to this.
- gcanyon 4y agoOr the short term -- flies have much shorter generations. That doesn't guarantee faster evolution, but it helps.
- jabl 4y agoMaybe the adaptation would require significantly more advanced visual processing with attendant increase in weight, size, and energy consumption, making it not worth it?
- miohtama 4y agoMaybe compound eyes have some inherit flaw that makes it harder to process visual signal of stripes.
- aeternum 4y agoOur eyes can also be confused by relatively simple patterns: http://brainden.com/images/ricewave-big.gif http://brainden.com/images/ricewave-big.gif Intuitively, it does seem like stripes would make it more difficult to achieve focus for a compound eye, similar to how when looking through a chain-link fence or window screen it's easy to focus the wrong plane due to the spaced repetition.
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- therusskiy 4y agoZebra stripes are basically an adversarial pattern for Neural Net in a fly's brain.
- sandworm101 4y agoEvolution is two-sided race. Insects breed/evolve much faster than large mammals. One must wonder why they haven't evolved the brainpower to overcome this trickery. The difficulty of feeding on zebra must not be enough of an evolutionary pressure ... until all the other animals start evolving stripes too.
- metadat 4y agoThat is a good question. Given the short lifespan of the creatures, one hypothesis is their evolution is stuck in a high-walled local maxima.
- gcanyon 4y ago"the source of the effect remains unexplained" They list several candidate explanations, but miss one I came up with immediately: maybe zebras are in some other way less attractive targets for the flies -- their skin is thicker, their blood/fluids don't taste as good, etc. -- and the stripes are simply a visual indicator to the flies that they are zebras, and therefore less desirable. This sort of trait has evolved poison frogs, insects, and other plants and animals, so why not zebras?
- gernb 4y agomaybe zebra skin has a different oder. They said they used pelts.
- Gys 4y agoSeems easy to test? Just paint a horse or cow and keep count of the flies.
- qbrass 4y agoIt doesn't differentiate the flies mistaking the cow for a zebra, compared to the stripes themselves doing something else to keep the flies away.
- idlewords 4y agoIt does when the flies are circling a cow in the UK or Japan.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoCheck out this snazzy looking fellow: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-dressed-horses-zebras-determine-purpose-stripes-180971540/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-dressed...
- oblak 4y agoIs it repelling or camouflage?
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- amelius 4y agoAnd at night?
- Sharlin 4y agoThe idea that vertical stripes confuse a fly’s visual processing reminds me of Peter Watts’s Blindsight, in which vampire legends are based on a real H. sapiens subspecies that predated on baseline humans in the Paleolithic but went extinct once we started building permanent settlements. This was caused by an (un)fortunate bug in the vampires’ visual cortex that made them unable to perceive right angles without glitching out (this, naturally, would also have been the source of the belief that vampires are repulsed by crosses). As a biologist, Watts was no doubt aware of the zebra stripe hypothesis when he wrote Blindsight.
- zshrdlu 4y agoYet the vampires were supposedly more intelligent than their prey!
- moralestapia 4y agoThis hypothesis has never made sense from an evolutionary standpoint, as it doesn't explain why zebras are the only animal (on a similar environment) that show this traita.
- rossdavidh 4y agoAnyone know if this has been tried on mosquitoes? Unfortunately, they probably rely too much on smell over vision...
- divbzero 4y agoFlies have been around since the Triassic [1] so could there be convergent evolution of zebra-like stripes at different points in Earth’s history, similar to how crab-like exoskeletons have evolved multiple times [2]? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
- kjkjadksj 4y agoMaybe zebra print socks will stop these ankle biting mosquitos that have invaded california
- chatterhead 4y agoObviously, the only way to actual test if it's the stripes or not is to test it on Beetlejuice.
- codefeenix 4y agoWhat about wavelength reflected by zebras versus(or compared to) waht flies can perceive?