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Experts discover how zebra stripes work to thwart horsefly attacks
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoI'm loving the upgraded horse blankets.
- alar44 4y ago[dead]
- personjerry 4y agoCan we reduce mosquito bites by wearing striped clothing?
- CommitSyn 4y agoThey paint stripes on cows to keep the horseflies away, so it's worth looking into.
- hammock 4y agoHorse flies, maybe. Mosquitos unlikely, they find you via smelling co2
- b112 4y agoHorse flies find by co2 as well, it is just their vision can thwart them...
- eyelidlessness 4y agoFew mosquitos in my neck of the woods, but I remember from childhood that raising a hand above your head was more effective than clothing choices. Raising a hand with a cigarette helped even more (I think the operating theory in my family was that they’re drawn to lower oxygen levels as it suggests a breathing being’s presence), but generally that was frowned upon while I was growing up.
- dylan604 4y agowhat neck of the woods is that, as "i want to go to there". just one summer, i'd love to run around outdoors and not worry about mosquitos
- eyelidlessness 4y agoSeattle! We have them, don’t get me wrong. But nothing like the swamps of northern Virginia I grew up in.
- danuker 4y agoI suppose the swamps will fully flood and the mosquitos will move north in due time.
- bagels 4y agoNot many in San Diego.
- andrewl 4y agoThis is interesting. I’d always assumed the stripes were camouflage, similar to a tiger’s stripes. Tigers look orange and black to us, but many prey animals perceive color differently, and the tiger’s stripes help it blend in among jungle foliage. The photos in this short article demonstrate the effect: https://theconversation.com/why-do-tigers-have-stripes-145223 https://theconversation.com/why-do-tigers-have-stripes-14522...
- hammock 4y agoI had always heard the stripes were camouflage not to blend in with the environment, but to blend in with the herd - to make it hard for a predator to single one out
- fhars 4y agoTigers are not herd animals that are preyed on by other predators, though :-).
- solarengineer 4y agoIndeed. Tigers have evolved stripes for camouflage in grass.
- mmastrac 4y agoSpecifically because the animals are dichromats and cannot see the colour of the tigers' fur against the green of the grass because their colour reception is not sufficient. https://www.iflscience.com/we-now-know-why-tigers-bright-orange-color-is-actually-excellent-camouflage-52627 https://www.iflscience.com/we-now-know-why-tigers-bright-ora...
- hammock 4y agoI meant zebras
- chinaman425 4y agoDistracive camouflage.
- tedunangst 4y agoWouldn't an all white coat be even better?
- boomboomsubban 4y agoThat was my first thought, and without seeing the paper all I can do is guess. My guess is when they say the horseflies like big dark objects they mean big and/or dark, with big being the top priority. So a big white blob would still be more appealing than several small white and dark blobs. That, or the shade mean even white is sometimes a big grey blob.
- zdragnar 4y agoAnecdotally, big isn't really necessary, though it helps (especially when designing traps, since there are going to be a lot of the suckers). Look up either the H Trap or the Bug Ball. I've always thought black works best, but that might just be for horse flies- a quick google search seems to confirm that blue does work better than black for deer fly traps.
- b112 4y agoBlue does! I even have a blue hat, to which I tape blue masking tape, and spread tanglefoot on. I catch endless flies, and am not bit! Examples: https://eagergridlessbeaver.wordpress.com/2021/08/04/blue-solo-cup-deerfly-trap-hat/ https://eagergridlessbeaver.wordpress.com/2021/08/04/blue-so...
- pard68 4y agoAre deer flies a biting fly? We've got flies that bite, but I am only vaguely aware of the term deer fly.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoI am unaware of the term deer fly. The name tends to suggest that they'll bite deer; it's possible they're not interested in biting humans. Horseflies will happily bite humans, though they are pretty well guaranteed to die in the process. Wikipedia says that deer flies do bite humans and their bite 'may be painful'. They are a type of horsefly, suggesting that the description of their bite is understated.
- narag 4y agoYears ago, I started seeing transparent plastic bags full of water hanging in the doorways in my hometown, the given reason being that they prevented flies entering the bar or the house. I thought that was some kind of joke, but... it seemed to work, at least when the bags were under direct sunshine. Flies weren't very happy flying in the vicinity. Later people, emboldened, decided that strings of discarded CDs keep pidgeons away from balconies. I can't attest to that.
- pavelstoev 4y agowait till you visit eastern europe where drivers believed strings or single CD handing on the rear-view mirror somehow makes the car stealth to a police radar.
- wkat4242 4y agoMaybe not radar but IR laser guns? I don't think it'll actually work though.
- narag 4y agoThe goal is not avoid detection, but that they can't record your plate number.
- petodo 4y agothere certainly are reflective stripes you put around license plate which make very hard to take photo of license plate with flash
- hnbad 4y agoThey also make sure you pay an extra hard fine when they do manage to identify you after all.
- Xylakant 4y agoI always thought the idea was that the reflection from the flash would overload the camera sensor and hide your face/numberplate when a speed trap strikes.
- bmitc 4y agoI thought this was already known? What did this study add? > The team found that tabanid horseflies are attracted to large dark objects in their environment but less to dark broken patterns. All-gray coats were associated with by far the most landings, followed by coats with large black triangles placed in different positions, then small checkerboard patterns in no particular order. In another experiment, they found contrasting stripes attracted few flies whereas more homogeneous stripes were more attractive. The paragraph before this quoted paragraph seems to imply this study addresses the why, but for the life of me, I can't understand how this paragraph answers why.
- hyperthesis 4y agoMe neither. But fly eyesight apparently is based on flicker, and movement plus spatial frequency equals temporal frequency.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoHere's the end of the actual study, which sums up the "why" decently. >Our working hypothesis now is that horseflies are attracted to equid hosts owing to a combination of odour at a distance, then size of the animal contrasted against the sky or vegetation at a middle distance. But at close range, where they can no longer see the body's outline, flies make a visual switch to local features. If these are small dark objects contrasted against a light or white background, the horsefly no longer recognizes this as a host target and veers away. The contrast of stripes and their relatively small size are therefore the key elements of how stripes operate to thwart fly landings.
- prennert 4y agoMaybe they suffer from the barber pole problem. Since there is only an edge, and no corners, the flies cannot localise themselves when they are too close. Without corners, they wont be able to visually tell whether or not they get closer to the target, not if they move along the edge. If the stripes are non-homogeneous. They wont be able to tell neither how far they moved across them either.
- tristramb 4y ago[dead]
- tristramb 4y ago[dead]
- petodo 4y agoHow did they distinguish whether it's pattern or the paint itself working? Obviously if you cover 50% of skin by paint, which horseflies don't like, they will land only on the unpainted skin. I wonder if they painted skin to 80% scale if it decreased attacks even more.
- hennell 4y agoWho's painting anything? The link clearly shows horses covered in blankets. I'd imagine the comparison is done only between horses covered in blankets of various patterns, so the pattern is the only significant variable.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoIt's possible the black or white dye attracts or repels flies, but the contrasting triangles pattern should show if that were the issue.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- petodo 4y agoI confused it with different experiment when they directly painted cow (AFAIR) and measured number of mosquitos. Yes, here with all blankets of equal size it seems to provide more relevant results about which pattern attracts insects, though not sure why they didnt test zebra stripes which they keep mentioning.
- luckystarr 4y ago> Now the team want to determine why natural selection has driven striping in equids—the horse family—but not other hoofed animals. Probably some flying stingers that transmitted a lethal disease that these past horses couldn't quickly build resistance to. It could also be that this sickness came in waves with only a few survivors every time, and the patterns on the zebras got amplified on every wave until it reached the current state. In the beginning it may have even been a coincidence that the pattern was there for individuals which survived the plague, but over time as it amplified it transformed into a evolutionary benefit on its own.
- noworld 4y agoHow did they accurately measure how many flies landed on each horse?