Zebra

Why they are striped
All zebras are striped. But why? Scientists have proposed many different explanations for how the zebra pattern developed and was maintained through evolution. The best known is the hypothesis that ascribes to the zebra's pattern the function of defence against predators. The pattern is said to confuse predators, which find it hard to pick out an individual animal from the herd, or even to create the optical illusion of movement in the opposite direction from the animal's actual movement.

Interesting new findings suggest that the stripes may be a defence against bothersome horseflies and tsetse flies, which can see the polarisation of light. To an insect, a fully black animal is visible as a single shape of uniformly polarised light, whereas a zebra is "striped" in that respect too, and so is less noticeable. Some suggest that the black-and-white stripes also have a thermoregulatory or social role.

Whatever humans may speculate, stripes have been in fashion for zebras for thousands of years. Different species and subspecies of zebra have different basic stripe patterns, and the pattern of each individual zebra is as unique as a human fingerprint.