ELI5…. Zebras do not seem to blend in to their surroundings.
Why did they not evolve as a breed to be camouflaged?
How did these seemingly brightly colored animals survive predators?
In: Biology
The current leading theory is that the stripes somehow confuse insects and make them less likely to land on the animal (they’ve even tested this by painting stripes on regular horses) which is an evolutionary advantage against the deadly diseases spread by horseflies.
However, it is important to point out that human color vision is relatively unique in the animal kingdom. Almost all other mammals are, by human standards, red-green colorblind, so even though an animal’s camouflage doesn’t work on humans, it might well work on other animals. This is why tigers stay camouflaged even though they’re orange, and why hunters can wear blaze orange and not be visible to deer from a mile off.
They are camouflaged. Zebras coating makes them blend in fairly well against high grass, bushes and trees. Especially since many predators are colorblind.
It also camouflages them among each other in larger groups, making it hard for predators to pick out a single individual in larger groups of zebras.
It seems like they’re still researching it, but one the strongest reasons might be to keep off biting flies.
Zebras naturally roam in an area where lots of flies like to bite them and, when they bite them, they can transfer diseases. Scientists have found that stripes tend to confuse the flies and make it harder for them to land on the animals to suck their blood.
Thus, zebras that are more stripey or have more obvious stripes will be less likely to get landed on by disease carrying flies.
These zebras with less diseases and will live longer and be less likely to be picked off by predators. Zebras run in groups called herds, so the predators pick off the ones that are slower or weaker.
If they live longer, then they are more likely to survive to reproduce and pass on their more-stripey genes.
Thus, the next generation of zebras becomes more and more stripey.
As for how the stripes came to be in the first place… every time your cells copy each other, there is always a chance for an error in the copying process. One of those errors made an animal with stripes. It gave that animal enough of an advantage over the non-striped ones that it was able to survive and reproduce, making more and more striped ones with that same advantage. The stripes become more and more obvious until we have what we have today.
Source: [https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191031-the-truth-behind-why-zebras-have-stripes](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191031-the-truth-behind-why-zebras-have-stripes)
Fun fact: farmers painted black and white stripes on cows and they got bit a significant amount less than before by Bott flies, mosquitoes etc
Zebras have something that other prey animals of the savanna lack: a horse’s kick.
Zebra stripes are horrendous for blending into the savanna, but they’re very good at breaking up their own silhouette. It’s been theorized that this helps them blend together in a herd, like how dazzle camouflage works on warships. But how does that help them? Well, a kick from a zebra’s rear leg can kill a lion outright, or break its jaw, which is a slightly slower death sentence. If it’s hard to see in the moment where one zebra begins and another ends, a misjudged pounce can be incredibly dangerous for anyone hunting zebras.
There’s been studies showing that it has an effect on biting insects, but this doesn’t explain why this adaptation is unique to zebras. Other prey animals like antelope don’t have this strong kick for defense. Wild horses in Eurasia aren’t preyed on by pouncers.
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