Zebras have evolved white and black stripes as camouflage to confuse lions. That's the conventional wisdom, anyway. But, as is so often the case, the conventional wisdom appears to be wrong. New research in Nature Communications concludes that zebras' stripes are actually for preventing bites from nasty insects, such as tabanids (horse flies). For some reason, these flies avoid landing on black and white striped surfaces. For their study, the authors collected stripe pattern data on seven wild equids: plains zebra, Grévy's zebra, mountain zebra, African wild ass, Przewalski's horse, kiang, and Asiatic wild ass. They then overlaid a map...
