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The Surprising Reason Zebras Have Stripes
Oct 18, 2019 08:15:55   #
no propaganda please Loc: moon orbiting the third rock from the sun
 
The Surprising Reason Zebras Have Stripes
By putting black-and-white coats on horses, a new study shows that the pattern discourages biting flies from landing.
The Atlantic |

Ed Yong



For Tim Caro, it was surprisingly easy to dress horses like zebras. Several vendors were already selling coats with black-and-white stripes, often as fun gimmicks. But, as Caro learned, such coverings have an unexpectedly serious effect. “There are enormous benefits to having a striped coat for a horse,” he told me.

Caro, a biologist at the University of California at Davis, has spent years thinking about why zebras are striped, and has even written a book about this mystery. In his latest bid to get clear answers, he and his colleagues traveled to Hill Livery, a stable in southwest England that keeps several captive zebras alongside domestic horses. By comparing these two species, as well as horses that were comically cloaked in zebra-striped coats, the team found fresh evidence for what Caro thinks is the only plausible explanation for the striking stripes: They evolved to deter bloodsucking flies.

Scientists have been puzzling over the role of zebra stripes for more than 150 years. But, one by one, the most commonly proposed explanations have all been refuted. Some researchers have suggested that the stripes act as camouf**ge—they break up zebras’ outlines or resemble fields of tree trunks. But that can’t be true: Amanda Melin of the University of Calgary recently showed that lions and hyenas can’t even make out the stripes unless they get very close. Another hypothesis says that the black stripes heat up faster than the white ones, setting up circulating air currents that cool the zebras. But a recent study showed that water drums cloaked in zebra pelts heat up just as much as those covered in normal horse skins.

That leaves the fly idea. When it comes to biting insects, zebras are doubly cursed. For one, they’re highly susceptible to a variety of fatal diseases, including trypanosomiasis, African horse sickness, and equine influenza, that are spread by horseflies and tsetse flies. They’re also very vulnerable to insect attacks: Compared with other grazers such as antelopes, the hairs on their coat are unusually short, allowing flies to more easily find blood vessels with their piercing mouthparts.

Stripes, for some reason, seem to help. In 2014, Caro and his colleagues showed that striped horses—three zebra species and the African wild ass with thin stripes on its legs—tend to live in regions with lots of horseflies. And several researchers, over the years, have shown that these flies find it hard to land on striped surfaces. No one, however, had watched the insects trying to bite actual zebras. That’s why Caro’s team went to Hill Livery.

By watching and filming the stable’s horses and zebras, the team confirmed that horseflies were much worse at alighting on the latter. The flies had no problem finding the zebras or approaching them, but couldn’t stick the landing. “You get a quarter as many landings,” Caro said. “The flies just can’t probe for a blood meal with the zebras.”

The team found the same trend when they put striped coats on the horses. Cloaked in stripes, the very same animals suddenly became more resistant to flies, except on their uncovered heads. And uniformly colored coats had no effect; the stripes, specifically, befuddled the flies.

“When we looked at the videos, we found that the flies simply aren’t decelerating when they come in to the stripes,” Caro said. Either they miss and overshoot the zebras, or they bump into the hides and bounce off. Something’s clearly throwing them off, but the details are still a mystery. Caro said that they might treat the black stripes like a pair of trees, try to fly between them, and end up colliding with the white stripes. Alternatively, the stripes might mess with their optic flow—their sense of objects moving across their visual field.

Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido of the University of Minnesota, who studies insect vision, favors the latter idea. These insects use optic flow to gauge their own speed and their distance from nearby objects. “I think that the key is that the stripes’ thickness and orientation is not consistent, either within a stripe or across them,” she says. “This is probably what makes it difficult for the flies to control their landing.” (She also notes that cuttlefish use their color-changing skins to create striped patterns that move across their bodies, and these “passing clouds” might also work by disrupting the optic flow of their prey.)

If Gonzalez-Bellido is right, a more evenly striped coat should offer less protection. Caro’s team is now planning to test this hypothesis, and others. “Now that we know striped coats work just as well as stripes on real zebras, we can really play around with them,” he said. “We can put on coats with very wide stripes, or different orientations, or gray stripes. We can see how those affect fly behavior.”

In the meantime, he is wary of making firm recommendations to the equine industry. “I wouldn’t want to suggest that horse-wear companies sell striped livery for their riders yet,” he said. “We need to do the work first.”

More important, I ask him, Would a striped shirt protect me from biting flies? “I’ve been very cautious about saying that until we got these results, but now I’m not so sure,” he said. “I think that a striped T-shirt might work very nicely.”

Ed Yong is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers science.

Reply
Oct 18, 2019 08:27:48   #
slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas
 
no propaganda please wrote:
The Surprising Reason Zebras Have Stripes
By putting black-and-white coats on horses, a new study shows that the pattern discourages biting flies from landing.
The Atlantic |

Ed Yong



For Tim Caro, it was surprisingly easy to dress horses like zebras. Several vendors were already selling coats with black-and-white stripes, often as fun gimmicks. But, as Caro learned, such coverings have an unexpectedly serious effect. “There are enormous benefits to having a striped coat for a horse,” he told me.

Caro, a biologist at the University of California at Davis, has spent years thinking about why zebras are striped, and has even written a book about this mystery. In his latest bid to get clear answers, he and his colleagues traveled to Hill Livery, a stable in southwest England that keeps several captive zebras alongside domestic horses. By comparing these two species, as well as horses that were comically cloaked in zebra-striped coats, the team found fresh evidence for what Caro thinks is the only plausible explanation for the striking stripes: They evolved to deter bloodsucking flies.

Scientists have been puzzling over the role of zebra stripes for more than 150 years. But, one by one, the most commonly proposed explanations have all been refuted. Some researchers have suggested that the stripes act as camouf**ge—they break up zebras’ outlines or resemble fields of tree trunks. But that can’t be true: Amanda Melin of the University of Calgary recently showed that lions and hyenas can’t even make out the stripes unless they get very close. Another hypothesis says that the black stripes heat up faster than the white ones, setting up circulating air currents that cool the zebras. But a recent study showed that water drums cloaked in zebra pelts heat up just as much as those covered in normal horse skins.

That leaves the fly idea. When it comes to biting insects, zebras are doubly cursed. For one, they’re highly susceptible to a variety of fatal diseases, including trypanosomiasis, African horse sickness, and equine influenza, that are spread by horseflies and tsetse flies. They’re also very vulnerable to insect attacks: Compared with other grazers such as antelopes, the hairs on their coat are unusually short, allowing flies to more easily find blood vessels with their piercing mouthparts.

Stripes, for some reason, seem to help. In 2014, Caro and his colleagues showed that striped horses—three zebra species and the African wild ass with thin stripes on its legs—tend to live in regions with lots of horseflies. And several researchers, over the years, have shown that these flies find it hard to land on striped surfaces. No one, however, had watched the insects trying to bite actual zebras. That’s why Caro’s team went to Hill Livery.

By watching and filming the stable’s horses and zebras, the team confirmed that horseflies were much worse at alighting on the latter. The flies had no problem finding the zebras or approaching them, but couldn’t stick the landing. “You get a quarter as many landings,” Caro said. “The flies just can’t probe for a blood meal with the zebras.”

The team found the same trend when they put striped coats on the horses. Cloaked in stripes, the very same animals suddenly became more resistant to flies, except on their uncovered heads. And uniformly colored coats had no effect; the stripes, specifically, befuddled the flies.

“When we looked at the videos, we found that the flies simply aren’t decelerating when they come in to the stripes,” Caro said. Either they miss and overshoot the zebras, or they bump into the hides and bounce off. Something’s clearly throwing them off, but the details are still a mystery. Caro said that they might treat the black stripes like a pair of trees, try to fly between them, and end up colliding with the white stripes. Alternatively, the stripes might mess with their optic flow—their sense of objects moving across their visual field.

Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido of the University of Minnesota, who studies insect vision, favors the latter idea. These insects use optic flow to gauge their own speed and their distance from nearby objects. “I think that the key is that the stripes’ thickness and orientation is not consistent, either within a stripe or across them,” she says. “This is probably what makes it difficult for the flies to control their landing.” (She also notes that cuttlefish use their color-changing skins to create striped patterns that move across their bodies, and these “passing clouds” might also work by disrupting the optic flow of their prey.)

If Gonzalez-Bellido is right, a more evenly striped coat should offer less protection. Caro’s team is now planning to test this hypothesis, and others. “Now that we know striped coats work just as well as stripes on real zebras, we can really play around with them,” he said. “We can put on coats with very wide stripes, or different orientations, or gray stripes. We can see how those affect fly behavior.”

In the meantime, he is wary of making firm recommendations to the equine industry. “I wouldn’t want to suggest that horse-wear companies sell striped livery for their riders yet,” he said. “We need to do the work first.”

More important, I ask him, Would a striped shirt protect me from biting flies? “I’ve been very cautious about saying that until we got these results, but now I’m not so sure,” he said. “I think that a striped T-shirt might work very nicely.”

Ed Yong is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers science.
The Surprising Reason Zebras Have Stripes br By pu... (show quote)

All this time, I had thought Zebras were...so to speak...simply horses of a different color.

Now, I know the reasons why.

Reply
Oct 18, 2019 08:47:12   #
Wonttakeitanymore
 
no propaganda please wrote:
The Surprising Reason Zebras Have Stripes
By putting black-and-white coats on horses, a new study shows that the pattern discourages biting flies from landing.
The Atlantic |

Ed Yong



For Tim Caro, it was surprisingly easy to dress horses like zebras. Several vendors were already selling coats with black-and-white stripes, often as fun gimmicks. But, as Caro learned, such coverings have an unexpectedly serious effect. “There are enormous benefits to having a striped coat for a horse,” he told me.

Caro, a biologist at the University of California at Davis, has spent years thinking about why zebras are striped, and has even written a book about this mystery. In his latest bid to get clear answers, he and his colleagues traveled to Hill Livery, a stable in southwest England that keeps several captive zebras alongside domestic horses. By comparing these two species, as well as horses that were comically cloaked in zebra-striped coats, the team found fresh evidence for what Caro thinks is the only plausible explanation for the striking stripes: They evolved to deter bloodsucking flies.

Scientists have been puzzling over the role of zebra stripes for more than 150 years. But, one by one, the most commonly proposed explanations have all been refuted. Some researchers have suggested that the stripes act as camouf**ge—they break up zebras’ outlines or resemble fields of tree trunks. But that can’t be true: Amanda Melin of the University of Calgary recently showed that lions and hyenas can’t even make out the stripes unless they get very close. Another hypothesis says that the black stripes heat up faster than the white ones, setting up circulating air currents that cool the zebras. But a recent study showed that water drums cloaked in zebra pelts heat up just as much as those covered in normal horse skins.

That leaves the fly idea. When it comes to biting insects, zebras are doubly cursed. For one, they’re highly susceptible to a variety of fatal diseases, including trypanosomiasis, African horse sickness, and equine influenza, that are spread by horseflies and tsetse flies. They’re also very vulnerable to insect attacks: Compared with other grazers such as antelopes, the hairs on their coat are unusually short, allowing flies to more easily find blood vessels with their piercing mouthparts.

Stripes, for some reason, seem to help. In 2014, Caro and his colleagues showed that striped horses—three zebra species and the African wild ass with thin stripes on its legs—tend to live in regions with lots of horseflies. And several researchers, over the years, have shown that these flies find it hard to land on striped surfaces. No one, however, had watched the insects trying to bite actual zebras. That’s why Caro’s team went to Hill Livery.

By watching and filming the stable’s horses and zebras, the team confirmed that horseflies were much worse at alighting on the latter. The flies had no problem finding the zebras or approaching them, but couldn’t stick the landing. “You get a quarter as many landings,” Caro said. “The flies just can’t probe for a blood meal with the zebras.”

The team found the same trend when they put striped coats on the horses. Cloaked in stripes, the very same animals suddenly became more resistant to flies, except on their uncovered heads. And uniformly colored coats had no effect; the stripes, specifically, befuddled the flies.

“When we looked at the videos, we found that the flies simply aren’t decelerating when they come in to the stripes,” Caro said. Either they miss and overshoot the zebras, or they bump into the hides and bounce off. Something’s clearly throwing them off, but the details are still a mystery. Caro said that they might treat the black stripes like a pair of trees, try to fly between them, and end up colliding with the white stripes. Alternatively, the stripes might mess with their optic flow—their sense of objects moving across their visual field.

Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido of the University of Minnesota, who studies insect vision, favors the latter idea. These insects use optic flow to gauge their own speed and their distance from nearby objects. “I think that the key is that the stripes’ thickness and orientation is not consistent, either within a stripe or across them,” she says. “This is probably what makes it difficult for the flies to control their landing.” (She also notes that cuttlefish use their color-changing skins to create striped patterns that move across their bodies, and these “passing clouds” might also work by disrupting the optic flow of their prey.)

If Gonzalez-Bellido is right, a more evenly striped coat should offer less protection. Caro’s team is now planning to test this hypothesis, and others. “Now that we know striped coats work just as well as stripes on real zebras, we can really play around with them,” he said. “We can put on coats with very wide stripes, or different orientations, or gray stripes. We can see how those affect fly behavior.”

In the meantime, he is wary of making firm recommendations to the equine industry. “I wouldn’t want to suggest that horse-wear companies sell striped livery for their riders yet,” he said. “We need to do the work first.”

More important, I ask him, Would a striped shirt protect me from biting flies? “I’ve been very cautious about saying that until we got these results, but now I’m not so sure,” he said. “I think that a striped T-shirt might work very nicely.”

Ed Yong is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers science.
The Surprising Reason Zebras Have Stripes br By pu... (show quote)

They didn’t evolve, God in his infinite wisdom created them that way! We have a very intelligent and loving Father!

Reply
 
 
Oct 18, 2019 09:52:11   #
no propaganda please Loc: moon orbiting the third rock from the sun
 
Wonttakeitanymore wrote:
They didn’t evolve, God in his infinite wisdom created them that way! We have a very intelligent and loving Father!


Yes, God created all and made them as He saw fit, even though He may have caused evolution to modify and strengthen his creations.

Reply
Oct 18, 2019 12:06:00   #
RT friend Loc: Kangaroo valley NSW Australia
 
no propaganda please wrote:
The Surprising Reason Zebras Have Stripes
By putting black-and-white coats on horses, a new study shows that the pattern discourages biting flies from landing.
The Atlantic |

Ed Yong



For Tim Caro, it was surprisingly easy to dress horses like zebras. Several vendors were already selling coats with black-and-white stripes, often as fun gimmicks. But, as Caro learned, such coverings have an unexpectedly serious effect. “There are enormous benefits to having a striped coat for a horse,” he told me.

Caro, a biologist at the University of California at Davis, has spent years thinking about why zebras are striped, and has even written a book about this mystery. In his latest bid to get clear answers, he and his colleagues traveled to Hill Livery, a stable in southwest England that keeps several captive zebras alongside domestic horses. By comparing these two species, as well as horses that were comically cloaked in zebra-striped coats, the team found fresh evidence for what Caro thinks is the only plausible explanation for the striking stripes: They evolved to deter bloodsucking flies.

Scientists have been puzzling over the role of zebra stripes for more than 150 years. But, one by one, the most commonly proposed explanations have all been refuted. Some researchers have suggested that the stripes act as camouf**ge—they break up zebras’ outlines or resemble fields of tree trunks. But that can’t be true: Amanda Melin of the University of Calgary recently showed that lions and hyenas can’t even make out the stripes unless they get very close. Another hypothesis says that the black stripes heat up faster than the white ones, setting up circulating air currents that cool the zebras. But a recent study showed that water drums cloaked in zebra pelts heat up just as much as those covered in normal horse skins.

That leaves the fly idea. When it comes to biting insects, zebras are doubly cursed. For one, they’re highly susceptible to a variety of fatal diseases, including trypanosomiasis, African horse sickness, and equine influenza, that are spread by horseflies and tsetse flies. They’re also very vulnerable to insect attacks: Compared with other grazers such as antelopes, the hairs on their coat are unusually short, allowing flies to more easily find blood vessels with their piercing mouthparts.

Stripes, for some reason, seem to help. In 2014, Caro and his colleagues showed that striped horses—three zebra species and the African wild ass with thin stripes on its legs—tend to live in regions with lots of horseflies. And several researchers, over the years, have shown that these flies find it hard to land on striped surfaces. No one, however, had watched the insects trying to bite actual zebras. That’s why Caro’s team went to Hill Livery.

By watching and filming the stable’s horses and zebras, the team confirmed that horseflies were much worse at alighting on the latter. The flies had no problem finding the zebras or approaching them, but couldn’t stick the landing. “You get a quarter as many landings,” Caro said. “The flies just can’t probe for a blood meal with the zebras.”

The team found the same trend when they put striped coats on the horses. Cloaked in stripes, the very same animals suddenly became more resistant to flies, except on their uncovered heads. And uniformly colored coats had no effect; the stripes, specifically, befuddled the flies.

“When we looked at the videos, we found that the flies simply aren’t decelerating when they come in to the stripes,” Caro said. Either they miss and overshoot the zebras, or they bump into the hides and bounce off. Something’s clearly throwing them off, but the details are still a mystery. Caro said that they might treat the black stripes like a pair of trees, try to fly between them, and end up colliding with the white stripes. Alternatively, the stripes might mess with their optic flow—their sense of objects moving across their visual field.

Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido of the University of Minnesota, who studies insect vision, favors the latter idea. These insects use optic flow to gauge their own speed and their distance from nearby objects. “I think that the key is that the stripes’ thickness and orientation is not consistent, either within a stripe or across them,” she says. “This is probably what makes it difficult for the flies to control their landing.” (She also notes that cuttlefish use their color-changing skins to create striped patterns that move across their bodies, and these “passing clouds” might also work by disrupting the optic flow of their prey.)

If Gonzalez-Bellido is right, a more evenly striped coat should offer less protection. Caro’s team is now planning to test this hypothesis, and others. “Now that we know striped coats work just as well as stripes on real zebras, we can really play around with them,” he said. “We can put on coats with very wide stripes, or different orientations, or gray stripes. We can see how those affect fly behavior.”

In the meantime, he is wary of making firm recommendations to the equine industry. “I wouldn’t want to suggest that horse-wear companies sell striped livery for their riders yet,” he said. “We need to do the work first.”

More important, I ask him, Would a striped shirt protect me from biting flies? “I’ve been very cautious about saying that until we got these results, but now I’m not so sure,” he said. “I think that a striped T-shirt might work very nicely.”

Ed Yong is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers science.
The Surprising Reason Zebras Have Stripes br By pu... (show quote)


Excellent empirical evidence that evolution was the result of horse fly mentality, humans are bothered by not knowing and will try to fathom it out, here goes.

Same with horse flies, If all grazing animals were to have evolved with stripes the landing apparatuses of horse flies would be subject to improvement but the zebras found a niche to occupy when opportunity made it available, had the zebras not been in sufficiently small numbers the striped pattern would never have occurred.

This is known as the tyranny of success, and when behavioural formality is factored it become obvious that physics is idea driven.

Zebras demonstrate their formalized striped patterns, which are now impossible to change, mainly because the opportunities that could cause other mental aberrations leading to physical realities are not able to show themselves as possibilities due to zebra sociology.

Even if there was a crossing over of c********es making for a better species outcome was zebra realised, it wouldn't necessarily follow that the specific genetic modification will catch on, more likely, it for sure will be drowned out by the numerical factor, even if the offspring is not hybrid, thereby preventing its addition to the diversity of the zebras.

Genetically acquired information in large populations hardly ever becomes evident in animal species.

Chameleon animals use this same mental process to chemically change skin colour in different environments, this works because of the t***slucent nature of scales and skin which doesn't offer such a concrete barrier between thoughts and environmental factors as does hyde and hair, but if you disregard that fact you can easily understand the underpinning of evolution by ideas that become more and more rigid as animal populations grow in numbers.

Reply
Oct 18, 2019 13:32:34   #
no propaganda please Loc: moon orbiting the third rock from the sun
 
RT friend wrote:
Excellent empirical evidence that evolution was the result of horse fly mentality, humans are bothered by not knowing and will try to fathom it out, here goes.

Same with horse flies, If all grazing animals were to have evolved with stripes the landing apparatuses of horse flies would be subject to improvement but the zebras found a niche to occupy when opportunity made it available, had the zebras not been in sufficiently small numbers the striped pattern would never have occurred.

This is known as the tyranny of success, and when behavioural formality is factored it become obvious that physics is idea driven.

Zebras demonstrate their formalized striped patterns, which are now impossible to change, mainly because the opportunities that could cause other mental aberrations leading to physical realities are not able to show themselves as possibilities due to zebra sociology.

Even if there was a crossing over of c********es making for a better species outcome was zebra realised, it wouldn't necessarily follow that the specific genetic modification will catch on, more likely, it for sure will be drowned out by the numerical factor, even if the offspring is not hybrid, thereby preventing its addition to the diversity of the zebras.

Genetically acquired information in large populations hardly ever becomes evident in animal species.

Chameleon animals use this same mental process to chemically change skin colour in different environments, this works because of the t***slucent nature of scales and skin which doesn't offer such a concrete barrier between thoughts and environmental factors as does hyde and hair, but if you disregard that fact you can easily understand the underpinning of evolution by ideas that become more and more rigid as animal populations grow in numbers.
Excellent empirical evidence that evolution was ... (show quote)


Excellent information. Thank you so much and God Bless.
NPP and SWMBO

Reply
Oct 18, 2019 14:20:20   #
bahmer
 
no propaganda please wrote:
The Surprising Reason Zebras Have Stripes
By putting black-and-white coats on horses, a new study shows that the pattern discourages biting flies from landing.
The Atlantic |

Ed Yong



For Tim Caro, it was surprisingly easy to dress horses like zebras. Several vendors were already selling coats with black-and-white stripes, often as fun gimmicks. But, as Caro learned, such coverings have an unexpectedly serious effect. “There are enormous benefits to having a striped coat for a horse,” he told me.

Caro, a biologist at the University of California at Davis, has spent years thinking about why zebras are striped, and has even written a book about this mystery. In his latest bid to get clear answers, he and his colleagues traveled to Hill Livery, a stable in southwest England that keeps several captive zebras alongside domestic horses. By comparing these two species, as well as horses that were comically cloaked in zebra-striped coats, the team found fresh evidence for what Caro thinks is the only plausible explanation for the striking stripes: They evolved to deter bloodsucking flies.

Scientists have been puzzling over the role of zebra stripes for more than 150 years. But, one by one, the most commonly proposed explanations have all been refuted. Some researchers have suggested that the stripes act as camouf**ge—they break up zebras’ outlines or resemble fields of tree trunks. But that can’t be true: Amanda Melin of the University of Calgary recently showed that lions and hyenas can’t even make out the stripes unless they get very close. Another hypothesis says that the black stripes heat up faster than the white ones, setting up circulating air currents that cool the zebras. But a recent study showed that water drums cloaked in zebra pelts heat up just as much as those covered in normal horse skins.

That leaves the fly idea. When it comes to biting insects, zebras are doubly cursed. For one, they’re highly susceptible to a variety of fatal diseases, including trypanosomiasis, African horse sickness, and equine influenza, that are spread by horseflies and tsetse flies. They’re also very vulnerable to insect attacks: Compared with other grazers such as antelopes, the hairs on their coat are unusually short, allowing flies to more easily find blood vessels with their piercing mouthparts.

Stripes, for some reason, seem to help. In 2014, Caro and his colleagues showed that striped horses—three zebra species and the African wild ass with thin stripes on its legs—tend to live in regions with lots of horseflies. And several researchers, over the years, have shown that these flies find it hard to land on striped surfaces. No one, however, had watched the insects trying to bite actual zebras. That’s why Caro’s team went to Hill Livery.

By watching and filming the stable’s horses and zebras, the team confirmed that horseflies were much worse at alighting on the latter. The flies had no problem finding the zebras or approaching them, but couldn’t stick the landing. “You get a quarter as many landings,” Caro said. “The flies just can’t probe for a blood meal with the zebras.”

The team found the same trend when they put striped coats on the horses. Cloaked in stripes, the very same animals suddenly became more resistant to flies, except on their uncovered heads. And uniformly colored coats had no effect; the stripes, specifically, befuddled the flies.

“When we looked at the videos, we found that the flies simply aren’t decelerating when they come in to the stripes,” Caro said. Either they miss and overshoot the zebras, or they bump into the hides and bounce off. Something’s clearly throwing them off, but the details are still a mystery. Caro said that they might treat the black stripes like a pair of trees, try to fly between them, and end up colliding with the white stripes. Alternatively, the stripes might mess with their optic flow—their sense of objects moving across their visual field.

Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido of the University of Minnesota, who studies insect vision, favors the latter idea. These insects use optic flow to gauge their own speed and their distance from nearby objects. “I think that the key is that the stripes’ thickness and orientation is not consistent, either within a stripe or across them,” she says. “This is probably what makes it difficult for the flies to control their landing.” (She also notes that cuttlefish use their color-changing skins to create striped patterns that move across their bodies, and these “passing clouds” might also work by disrupting the optic flow of their prey.)

If Gonzalez-Bellido is right, a more evenly striped coat should offer less protection. Caro’s team is now planning to test this hypothesis, and others. “Now that we know striped coats work just as well as stripes on real zebras, we can really play around with them,” he said. “We can put on coats with very wide stripes, or different orientations, or gray stripes. We can see how those affect fly behavior.”

In the meantime, he is wary of making firm recommendations to the equine industry. “I wouldn’t want to suggest that horse-wear companies sell striped livery for their riders yet,” he said. “We need to do the work first.”

More important, I ask him, Would a striped shirt protect me from biting flies? “I’ve been very cautious about saying that until we got these results, but now I’m not so sure,” he said. “I think that a striped T-shirt might work very nicely.”

Ed Yong is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers science.
The Surprising Reason Zebras Have Stripes br By pu... (show quote)


Very interesting there NPP who would of thought that stripes affect the optics on insects. God is sure wonderful and we are just touching the tip of the iceberg so to speak of Gods great knowledge.

Reply
 
 
Oct 18, 2019 18:28:32   #
RT friend Loc: Kangaroo valley NSW Australia
 
no propaganda please wrote:
Excellent information. Thank you so much and God Bless.
NPP and SWMBO


I'm sure He will, I'm taking NPP to be "No Party Preference" and SWMBO to be "She Who Must be Obeyed", and He is my reference to Ahura Mazda, but seriously I really do invite any supporters of OPP to showcase any Theological thinker who was not a philosophical Idealist.

I personally do not subscribe any credibility to the ones that I know about, furthermore in this context I take p***e in referencing 2 thinkers who did not find satisfactory explanations in Faith alone and turned instead to metaphysical explanations, while avoiding philosophical logic, I delved as far as I could into Karen Armstrong and John Medows Rodwell a friend of Charles Darwin.

Interestingly Rodwell hails from the same Church (St. Ethelburga's Church in London) as did William Bedwell who was one of the original t***slators of the King James Bible.

Rodwell t***slated the Qu'ran prefering to spell it Koran which stuck as a reference to give distinction to the numerous Talmudic stories contained in the Qu'ran, their Society is still going.

I actually paid $100 to get a brand new copy of their (Folio Society) official documentation of ibn. Ishaq's biography, this could be a valuable book one day.

Its ironic that the only true relevance to the Qur'an coming from the commonly accepted historical documentation connected to Scriptures comes from the metaphysical stories from the Talmud.

That's not to say the Qur'an is solely metaphysical but Armstrong and Rodwell both could not conceive of anything beyond the metaphysical existential reality, Archangel Gabriel the Fallen Angel satan, Archangel Michael are a big part of the substance of the Qur'an that was and is rejected by Rodwell and Karen Armstrong.

If Karen Armstrong has since come to believe in the extraterrestrial I apologize but I've heard nothing of it.


Reply
Oct 19, 2019 07:31:08   #
billy a Loc: South Florida
 
God forgive me,but I get this image of some California college kid painting stripes on a turd in the dog-park to test this theory.

Reply
Oct 19, 2019 08:00:50   #
no propaganda please Loc: moon orbiting the third rock from the sun
 
RT friend wrote:
I'm sure He will, I'm taking NPP to be "No Party Preference" and SWMBO to be "She Who Must be Obeyed", and He is my reference to Ahura Mazda, but seriously I really do invite any supporters of OPP to showcase any Theological thinker who was not a philosophical Idealist.

I personally do not subscribe any credibility to the ones that I know about, furthermore in this context I take p***e in referencing 2 thinkers who did not find satisfactory explanations in Faith alone and turned instead to metaphysical explanations, while avoiding philosophical logic, I delved as far as I could into Karen Armstrong and John Medows Rodwell a friend of Charles Darwin.

Interestingly Rodwell hails from the same Church (St. Ethelburga's Church in London) as did William Bedwell who was one of the original t***slators of the King James Bible.

Rodwell t***slated the Qu'ran prefering to spell it Koran which stuck as a reference to give distinction to the numerous Talmudic stories contained in the Qu'ran, their Society is still going.

I actually paid $100 to get a brand new copy of their (Folio Society) official documentation of ibn. Ishaq's biography, this could be a valuable book one day.

Its ironic that the only true relevance to the Qur'an coming from the commonly accepted historical documentation connected to Scriptures comes from the metaphysical stories from the Talmud.

That's not to say the Qur'an is solely metaphysical but Armstrong and Rodwell both could not conceive of anything beyond the metaphysical existential reality, Archangel Gabriel the Fallen Angel satan, Archangel Michael are a big part of the substance of the Qur'an that was and is rejected by Rodwell and Karen Armstrong.

If Karen Armstrong has since come to believe in the extraterrestrial I apologize but I've heard nothing of it.

I'm sure He will, I'm taking NPP to be "No Pa... (show quote)


NPP stands for No Propaganda Please and SWMBO is She Who Must be Obeyed, from a novel by H Ryder Hagard, but in reference to what I always say to those people who are in my dog training classes. "If you tell a dog something, it is not a suggestion but a command that must be obeyed.
SWMBO

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Oct 19, 2019 09:49:37   #
greenmountaineer Loc: Vermont
 
That is truly weird. There is a lot of biology that we don't know yet, but this one is really surprising. I'll have to get a black and white striped outfit for walking around in Vermont forests next year and see if it keeps off the black Flies, Deer Flies and others. In this area, those two are the worst pests.

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Oct 19, 2019 15:55:58   #
RT friend Loc: Kangaroo valley NSW Australia
 
no propaganda please wrote:
NPP stands for No Propaganda Please and SWMBO is She Who Must be Obeyed, from a novel by H Ryder Hagard, but in reference to what I always say to those people who are in my dog training classes. "If you tell a dog something, it is not a suggestion but a command that must be obeyed.
SWMBO


Isn't that expecting everyone to know everything, really it took me 3 years to achieve head explosion then I lost it again.

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Oct 19, 2019 20:52:43   #
greenmountaineer Loc: Vermont
 
As a chemistry teacher at Burlington High, I used to introduce my students at the start of the year with a quote from Isaac Azimov, that science was a collection of unrejected hypotheses. Azimov, who died some years ago and may not be as well known aws he once was, was a science fiction writer who had also been associate professor of biochemistry at Boston U.

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Oct 20, 2019 10:02:33   #
RT friend Loc: Kangaroo valley NSW Australia
 
greenmountaineer wrote:
As a chemistry teacher at Burlington High, I used to introduce my students at the start of the year with a quote from Isaac Azimov, that science was a collection of unrejected hypotheses. Azimov, who died some years ago and may not be as well known aws he once was, was a science fiction writer who had also been associate professor of biochemistry at Boston U.


Science is the explanation of everything, we've made it, nothing has been de-surmised, I remembered what everything was all about, gosh it's done my well-being a power of good, science was the cause of all blessings sent fort by familiarity, isn't it strange a format can become formality, not really when you consider that spaghetti is Italian and pastor is Latin, all roads lead to Rome , what is the emblim of our species ? if only it were science, - verily spaghetti sauce would be a pastoralists contribution to a campfire brew instead of gum leaves.

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