Sunlit zebra stripes may confuse the thermal perception of blood vessels causing the visual unattractiveness of zebras to horseflies.

ABSTRACT: Multiple hypotheses have been proposed for possible functions of zebra stripes. The most thoroughly experimentally supported advantage of zebra stripes is their visual unattractiveness to horseflies (tabanids) and tsetse flies. We propose here a plausible hypothesis why biting horseflies avoid host animals with striped pelages: in sunshine the temperature gradients of the skin above the slightly warmer blood vessels are difficult to distinguish from the temperature gradients induced by the hairs at the borderlines of warmer black and cooler white stripes. To test this hypothesis, we performed a field experiment with tabanids walking on a host-imitating grey test target with vessel-mimicking thin black stripes which were slightly warmer than their grey surroundings in sunshine, while under

SUBMITTER: Takacs P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9352684 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature