“It could be to confuse predators. It could be some kind of social adaptation to help zebras recognize each other. It could be thermoregulation.”
For the current study, Tombak, then a PhD candidate at Princeton, and her team wanted to test stripe width to see if narrower ones might berepulsive to flies—a potential evolutionary advantage that would explain the difference between zebra species. They also restricted their experiment to close-range encounters to rule out the theory that the repulsion required an illusion that could only happen at a distance. Hence the plexiglass box.
The flies chose the impala skin about four times as often as they chose either zebra skin. And over the 100 rounds, the team found no obvious difference between stripes of different widths.
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