In the end, they would just bounce off, confused, and move along to a different surface or animal. Under observation, the flies would try to land on the stripes but then fail to decelerate as they normally would when approaching a non-striped surface. Even though tsetse fly populations thrive in zebra country, analyses of tsetse flies’ diets found no trace of zebra blood. In addition to providing camouflage, some scientists think that zebra stripes may help protect their thin hair from being bit by horseflies and tsetse flies, which transmit diseases like sleeping sickness, African horse sickness and the potentially fatal equine influenza. Even tiny bumblebees use stripes, especially around their back end, to direct potential predators into associating them with other toxic insects with powerful stingers, a survival tactic known as Müllerian mimicry. Not only does this setup camouflage them in the middle of the dense vegetation of their natural habitat, but some scientists think that these patterns also help young okapi to find and follow their mother in the rain forest.įrom big to little, land to sea, many other animals also use stripes to either help keep them from being hunted or to help them hunt, including the striped marlin, striped hyena, tapir and Indian palm squirrel. They have a chocolate-reddish brown coat with white horizontal stripes located on the back, rings of white stripes on their legs, and white fur on their ankles. Okapis, also known as forest giraffes, are often confused as being a relative of the zebra because of their very similar striping pattern. Bongos (the third-largest antelope in the world), have as many as 10 to 15 white stripes on their bodies over a chestnut-brown colored coat, allowing them to blend into the background of their habitats. Tigers aren’t the only animals using the “stripes as camouflage” technique.
#TIGER STRIPES SKIN#
If you were to shave off all of the fur, its skin underneath would show the same exact markings, almost appearing as though they were tattooed! Also, each tiger’s stripe patterns are completely unique, as distinct as human fingerprints. Fun fact: it’s not just a tiger’s fur that has black stripes. It tends to hang out in dense jungle, and these kinds of stripes are very well adapted to its specific environment. The Sumatran tiger subspecies, for example, has stripes that are a lot more narrow than other tigers’ stripes, and it also has a larger quantity of stripes.
So for an unsuspecting deer, a hunting tiger would blend into the environment fairly seamlessly.įurther evidence that tiger markings are for camouflage is that stripes vary among the six tiger subspecies.
Mammals that tigers hunt, like deer, are only able to process blue and green, making them obliviously colorblind to orange. Humans have what is called a trichromat eye, meaning our vision can process red, blue and green-based colors, giving us the ability to see tigers appearing as orange. You may be thinking, in a dark green jungle, wouldn’t bright orange and black stripes be super obvious? While this color combination makes a tiger relatively easy to spot for human eyes, recent research published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface used computer simulations and image processing techniques to see how detectable a species is in its natural environment to other native animals in the same habitat.
These stripes help it to camouflage with filtered sunlight and the shadow of trees so that it can’t be easily spotted by its prey. When in the forest or the jungle, its black stripes and brown fur imitate dappled sunlight. They work in a way that biologists call “disruptive coloration,” breaking up a tiger’s bulky shape and large size so that this magnificent creature can blend in better with trees and tall grasses.
Here’s where the tiger’s markings become very handy. But as a solitary cat (tigers are not pack animals and do not hunt in a group like lions do), the tiger relies on pure stealth for its hunting. Since tigers are apex predators at the tippy-top of the food chain, they don’t need to worry about hiding from animals that might eat them. We know nature doesn’t do much by accident or for no reason, so what are the stripes on tigers for? A Tiger’s Stripes Provide Camouflage Jaguars and leopards have their rosette spots, lions have their golden fur and male lions their mane, but tigers are unique as they strut around jungles and grasslands with their vertical-striped markings, which range from brown to black. Tigers are one of the easiest of the big cats to identify because of their dramatic striped coats.
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