Published in Physics World, 1 Nov 2012
Biophysicists are offering new clues to this age-old mystery, as Jon Cartwright reports
Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories told how various animals came to be. “How the rhinoceros got his skin”, “How the camel got his hump” and “How the whale got his throat” were some of the titles in the famous 1902 collection. The British writer never wrote a story entitled “How the zebra got his stripes” – although if you read his words closely, you’ll discover that, spooked by the leopard, the zebra fled into the forest and adopted stripes as a disguise.
That was just fiction, but a few decades earlier in 1867 the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace had put forward a similar idea – that the zebra evolved stripes as camouflage against predators in the tall grass. Wallace’s fellow naturalist Charles Darwin disagreed, pointing out that zebras prefer to hang out in open savannahs, where tall grass is rare. And so the scientific debate began: how did the zebra get his stripes?
Biologists haven’t been short of proposals. There are at least ten, including that stripes afford zebras a means to recognise one another, or that they provide an indication of fitness for potential mates. But none of these hypotheses has seen much supporting evidence, according to biophysicist Gábor Horváth at Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary, and colleagues. […]
For the rest of this article, please contact Jon Cartwright for a pdf.