Zebra stripes confuse flies

[lpetrich]

How a Zebra’s Stripes Put Bloodthirsty Flies Into a Tailspin | by Popular Science | Popular Science | Medium
Zebra stripes confuse biting flies, causing them to abort their landings | Science | AAAS
Zebra stripes, tabanid biting flies and the aperture effect | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Benefits of zebra stripes: Behaviour of tabanid flies around zebras and horses
Zebra stripes and other high-contrast patterns disorient biting flies, new study suggests - CNN

Zebras are well-known for their stripes, and their closest relatives are solid-color equids: horses and donkeys. The recently-extinct quagga was partially striped. This has led to a lot of speculation about what zebras' stripes might do for their owners. From Science magazine:

Scientists have proposed more than a dozen ideas to explain why zebras evolved stripes. Some say the bold patterns confuse their predators, or that they keep the animals cool. But all of these ideas have been disproved or lack strong evidence.

In 2014, researchers showed the ranges of the horsefly and tsetse fly species and the three most distinctively striped equid species (Equus burchelli, E. zebra, and E. grevyi) overlap to a remarkable degree. The scientists argued that zebras evolved the stripes to avoid these insects, which often carry fatal diseases. Now, they’re back with more proof.

Part of their research was to prepare different colors and patterns for some domestic horses -- black, white, and zebra-striped. Horseflies seldom landed on the zebra-striped blankets but they did land on the black and white ones. They also landed on the horses' heads at the same rate, and they circled the horses at the same rate.

From the PLOS One abstract,

In separate, detailed video analyses, tabanids approached zebras faster and failed to decelerate before contacting zebras, and proportionately more tabanids simply touched rather than landed on zebra pelage in comparison to horses. Taken together, these findings indicate that, up close, striped surfaces prevented flies from making a controlled landing but did not influence tabanid behaviour at a distance.

So zebra stripes confuse the flies.

 

[Potoooooooo]

I wonder how well polka-dots work?

 

[ZiprHead]

Doesn't seem to keep the flies away from Ted Nugent.



It's probably the shit in his pants.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Doesn't seem to keep the flies away from Ted Nugent.

View attachment 30251

It's probably the shit in his pants.

I believe i can place that reference.