The 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

The 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.