Saturday, June 19, 2010

Zebras... how are they camouflaged?


So I was wondering... How the heck are zebras camouflaged???? I mean, what in their environment could they possibly blend into??? Because it's not like you see a ton of black and white zebra print stuff in the African savanna! But I thought to myself, "There must be a reason that they have these stripes, otherwise they would have been killed off by predators in a matter of days!" Following my thoughts, I looked it up.

The wavy lines of zebras blend into long grasses when the zebras are in few numbers. How? The lion, their main predator, is colorblind, so the black and white fits in perfectly with all of the other black and white that the lions see. When they are in their herds, on the other hand, they are pretty hard for the lions to miss. But the stripes of all of the zebras being close together makes it hard for the lions to distinguish just one zebra out of the group.

also, the stripes on zebras are unique on each one, so they also serve as ways that the zebras tell each other apart.
Soooo... yep. That's zebras for you. And believe it or not, their stripes actually aren't the stupidest camouflage ever, and thanks to them, the crocs in Pearls Before Swine
can continue to say "HELLO ZEBA NEIGHBA!!"

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