Striped bodypainting protects against horseflies.

ABSTRACT: Bodypainting is widespread in African, Australian and Papua New Guinean indigenous communities. Many bodypaintings use white or bright yellow/grey/beige stripes on brown skin. Where the majority of people using bodypainting presently live, blood-sucking horseflies are abundant, and they frequently attack the naked brown regions of the human body surface with the risk of transmitting the pathogens of dangerous diseases. Since horseflies are deterred by the black and white stripes of zebras, we hypothesized that white-striped paintings on dark brown human bodies have a similar effect. In a field experiment in Hungary, we tested this hypothesis. We show that the attractiveness to horseflies of a dark brown human body model significantly decreases, if it is painted with the white stripes that

SUBMITTER: Horvath G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6366178 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature