Anectode

Zebra, gnu, buffalo and antelope are all animals living on the African savannah, but why only zebra has the distinctive stripes? The seemingly usual problem which few people would think about is always being searched by zoologists actually. The traditional mainstream thinking is that the stripes can help zebras hiding in the grass, and blend their bodies in the high grass to avoid being founded by predators. Another mainstream thinking is that the stripes will make predators dazzle and unable to judge the zebras movement. Other thinking agreed that the stripes could bring down the temperature, and make little zebras able to identify the others, they can find their groups as soon as possible among the thousands of hundreds of herbivores. The newest speculation came up with an interesting viewpoint: the zebras stripes are used to prevent from the mosquito bites. The researchers founded that the herbivores on the African plain are always attacked by lots of mosquitoes, especially the heads, legs and tails are mosquitoes favorite. While the zebras have compact stripes in the three parts——the result is that as grazing, the zebras heads wont be attacked by many mosquitoes. The scientists guessed that the body hair of zebra is short, so it is easy to be bit by mosquitoes. As an indemnifying measure to avoid being bitten, the zebra gradually evolved the black and white stripes to repel the mosquitoes effectively.