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Zebras Have Their Own Bug Repellent?
Eww bugs! They are so annoying! We humans are lucky that we can apply repellents to
avoid nasty bites. But what's an animal to do? They have no choice but to spend their days
shooing them off with their tails, unless, of course, they are zebras, who apparently have their
own automatic repellent—their striped skin!
Scientists had originally thought that the reason why the animal had developed the black and white lines was to help protect itself from predators in the African savannah, because the stripes make it difficult to single out one zebra that is traveling with a herd. While that may be true, the theory has never been tested or proven. Now the experts have another—that the stripes have  evolved to repel the  annoying horseflies that not  only  feed  off their blood, but  also,
transmit dangerous germs into the bodies of these innocent animals.
The study was performed by a team of Swedish scientists. One of the clues that got them thinking along these lines was the fact that darker horses got bitten more often than light-
colored or white ones.
The fact that zebras are born black and only develop stripes as they grow older made the scientists  theorize  that  the  stripes  may be  something  the  animals have  developed  to  make
themselves less attractive to flies.
To test if this may be the case, they painted some boards at a horse-infested horse farm in Budapest with patterns of black and white stripes of varying widths and applied a layer of glue on them. What they noticed was that the places where the black and white stripes were at their narrowest (similar to what zebras have) attracted the fewest flies. They achieved similar results
when they painted horses with black and white zebra-like stripes.
While the researchers are not  sure why this may be the case, they believe it may be something to do with the way insects operate horseflies are attracted to horizontally polarized light; since white does not reflect it, white horses are luckier than black ones. But zebras seem to be the luckiest of all. When the researchers measured the polarized light reflected from real
zebra skins, they found that it matched light patterns that were the least attractive to horseflies.
While this theory does make logical sense, nobody is 100 percent sure that it is really true, given that it has never been tested on a real zebra. If it is true, it does raise the question of why a horse, a close relative of the zebra has failed to develop stripes. The researchers believe that this could be because there are more horseflies in Africa, where zebras reside, then anywhere
else in the world.
 

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