#Black and white stripes how to
#Black and white stripes skin

Caro was commenting on a team who, while studying a herd of zebras at Hill Livery in the United Kingdom, dressed horses in black-and-white striped outfits and let them loose among zebras and horses without fake stripes to hopefully gain insight on the purpose of stripes. “People have been talking about zebra stripes for over a hundred years, but it's just a matter of really doing experiments and thinking clearly about the issue to understand it better,” ecologist Tim Caro told BBC Future in 2019. In the history of the study of zebras, researchers have proposed at least 18 different theories on why zebras have stripes, with explanations ranging from camouflage to protection against predators to marks of uniqueness like a human fingerprint. Question answered! However: researchers still aren’t sure why zebras have stripes at all. A shaved zebra, without any stripes, could be almost unrecognizable as an all-black animal. Since white stripes only exist because pigment is denied, black is understood to be the “default” colour of a zebra.īeneath all that fur, zebras have black skin, too. What’s important about zebras is that their white fur represents an absence of melanin white is not its own pigment. In zebras, chemical messengers determine which melanocytes deliver pigment to which section of fur, thus creating the zebra’s black and white pattern. In both cases, melanocyte cells produce melanin-the pigment-that is outwardly visible.

#Black and white stripes skin

These cells are present in all animals, and they’re primarily responsible for generating the pigment that gives colour to skin and hair. But looks are deceiving in the zebra’s case.Īll of a zebra’s fur, both black and white, grows from follicles that contain melanocyte cells. Q: What’s black and white and red all over?īut this question is no joke, because it actually does have an answer: zebras are black with white stripes.Īt first glance, it may appear the opposite is true-after all, the black stripes of many zebras end on the belly and towards the inside of the legs, revealing the rest as white. The question of whether zebras are white with black stripes or black with white stripes might seem like the set-up for a classic joke like this one:

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#Black and white stripes how to

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