Have you ever wondered if zebras are white with black stripes or black with white stripes?
The zebra's hide is black and white, unlike the dry, brown-and-green, treeless grassland and savannah woodlands of their home territories of East and southern Africa.
Each individual has their own stripes. The plains zebra, mountain zebra and Grevy's zebra have different striping patterns. Some of the hide is black, while others are brown, and some have stripes on their bodies but not on their legs. The quagga had minimal striping on its head, mane and neck.
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Tim Caro, a behavioral and evolutionary ecologist at the University of California, Davis, said that all zebras have the same skin color. This doesn't answer the question of whether their fur is black with white stripes or not. We have to look at the zebra's melanocytes, the cells that produce fur.
Although zebras have black skin, different processes determine their fur color, just like a light-skinned person can have dark hair, Caro said. It may seem like zebras are white with black stripes because of their light colored hair and light bellies.
That's not the case. A 2005 review in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology states that every piece of hair is created from a melanocytes filled follicle. The cells that make the color of hair and skin are produced by these cells. A lot of melanin leads to darker colors, such as dark brown or black, while less leads to lighter colors, such as hazel or blond, Live Science previously reported. White fur has melanocytes that make up the stripes of white hair, but they have turned off, meaning they don't produce any pigment.
Caro told Live Science that the production of melanocytes is not prevented during the development of a white hair. The default state for zebras is to have black hair and white stripes.
African striped mice have stripes on their bodies. The image is called Utopia_88
African striped mice have light and dark stripes running along their furry bodies, but the exact biological processes behind them aren't known. Light-colored hair is caused by the stop of a master regulator gene in charge of melanocyte development.
The zebra is black with white stripes. Caro and his colleagues found that this pattern may keep flies away. African horseflies landed less frequently on horses wearing striped or checked rugs than they did on horses wearing solid colored rugs, according to a study published in 2020. The biting flies can carry diseases that are fatal to zebras.
Caro said that there are very few mammals with contrasting stripes like a zebra. The okapi has the same stripes on the rump, but other than that, no other species has black and white stripes. The fly deterrent function is unique to equids because they are so susceptible to diseases carried by biting flies in Africa.
Live Science published the original article.
