How do a zebra's stripes act as camouflage?

A zebra's stripes offer protection from predators in the form of camouflage -- and a way to identify individual members within the larger group. Learn more about zebra stripes in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff works dot com
where smart Happens. Hi Marshall Brain with today's question, how
do a zebra stripes act as camouflage to humans? A
zebras stripes stick out like a sore thumb, so it's

(00:22):
hard to imagine that the stripes act as any kind
of camouflage. Zoologists believe the stripes offer zebras protection from
predators in a couple of different ways. The first is
as simple pattern camouflage, much like the military uses in
its fatigue designs. The wavy lines of a zebra blend

(00:44):
in with the wavy lines of the tall grass around it.
It doesn't matter that the zebra stripes are black and
white and the lines of grass or yellow, brown, or green,
because the zebra's main predator, the lion, is color blind.
The pattern of the camouflage is much more important than
its color when hiding from these predators. If a zebra

(01:04):
is standing still in matching surroundings, a lion may overlook
it completely. This benefit may help an individual zebra in
some situations, but the more significant means of protection has
to do with zebra herds. Zebras usually travel in large groups,
in which they stay very close to each other. Even

(01:27):
with their camouflage pattern, It's highly unlikely that a large
gathering of zebras would be able to escape the notice
of a lion, but their stripes help them use this
large size to their advantage. When all the zebras keep
together as a big group, the pattern of each zebra
stripes blends in with the stripes of all the zebras

(01:48):
around it. This is confusing to the lion, who sees
a large, moving striped mass instead of individual zebras. The
lion has trouble picking out any one zebra, and so
it doesn't have a very good plan of attack. It's
hard for the lion to even recognize which way each
zebra is moving. Imagine the difference in pursuing one animal

(02:11):
and charging into an amorphous blob of animals moving every
which way. The lions inability to distinguish zebras also makes
it more difficult for it to target and track weaker
zebras in the herd. So do zebra stripes confuse zebras
as much as they confuse lions. Oddly enough, while making

(02:32):
zebras indistinguishable to other animals, zebra stripes actually help zebras
recognize each other. Stripe patterns are like zebra fingerprints. Every
zebra has a slightly different arrangement. Zoologists believe this is
how zebras distinguish who's who in a zebra herd. This

(02:53):
certainly has significant benefits. A zebra mare and her full
can keep track of each other in a large word,
for example, and a zebra can very quickly distinguish its
own herd from another. This also helps human researchers because
it enables them to track particular zebras in the wild.
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(03:16):
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