About 30 miles north of the equator, in central Kenya, Kaia Tombak and her colleagues stood beside a plexiglass box. Tombak, who studies the evolution of animals’ social behavior, was dressed for the ...

Horseflies misjudge landings on zebra patterns, compared with solid gray or black surfaces, which provides evidence for why evolution came up with the black-and-white pattern. Everyone loves zebras.

Zebras' thick, black stripes may have evolved to help these iconic creatures stay cool in the midday African heat, a new study suggests. Many African animals sport some stripes on their bodies, but ...

How did the zebra get its stripes? The fashionable patterned coat protects the animal from horsefly bites by disorienting the flies during the landing process, research has shown. But how exactly do ...

The function of zebra stripes have been debated for quite some time. The different hypotheses include: Camouflage — However, predators seemed to find them just fine in all tested settings. Temperature ...

A couple years ago, I shared an elegant study about the reasons that zebras are striped (more here). In short, that study found that horseflies (tabanids) and the deadly diseases they transmit were ...