Why do quolls have spots, and zebras have stripes?
March 19, 2024 5:52 PM Subscribe
Why do quolls have spots, and zebras have stripes?
When it comes to blending in, there's a lot we can learn from the animal kingdom. And while the reasons for camouflage vary, they all come back to survival.
Some fun things I learned from Ed Yong's An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us:
* Humans tend to have a lousy impression of how animals experience the world, because for us the world is defined by our acute vision. Primates have some of the most acute vision of all animals--the only creatures who have better are raptors.
* Relative to most mammals, humans have lousy night-time vision. It's a trade-off for our acute daytime vision.
* Lions do most of their hunting at night.
* At night, and with their lousy visual acuity, a lion would only be able to resolve a zebra's stripes from very up close. Mostly a zebra just looks like a gray donkey to a lion.
posted by polecat at 9:19 PM on March 19 [2 favorites]
* Humans tend to have a lousy impression of how animals experience the world, because for us the world is defined by our acute vision. Primates have some of the most acute vision of all animals--the only creatures who have better are raptors.
* Relative to most mammals, humans have lousy night-time vision. It's a trade-off for our acute daytime vision.
* Lions do most of their hunting at night.
* At night, and with their lousy visual acuity, a lion would only be able to resolve a zebra's stripes from very up close. Mostly a zebra just looks like a gray donkey to a lion.
posted by polecat at 9:19 PM on March 19 [2 favorites]
Alan Watts ftfy:
Q. Is a zebra a yellow horse with black stripes or a black horse with yellow stripes?
A. Neither, it is an invisible horse striped yellow and black so that people don’t bump into it.
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:00 AM on March 20
Q. Is a zebra a yellow horse with black stripes or a black horse with yellow stripes?
A. Neither, it is an invisible horse striped yellow and black so that people don’t bump into it.
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:00 AM on March 20
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posted by GenjiandProust at 6:04 PM on March 19