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Zebra Stripes (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,342
Discovery Miles 13 420
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Zebra Stripes (Hardcover)
Series: mersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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From eminent biologists like Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles
Darwin to famous authors such as Rudyard Kipling in his Just So
Stories, many people have asked, "Why do zebras have stripes?"
There are many explanations, but until now hardly any have been
seriously addressed or even tested. In Zebra Stripes, Tim Caro
takes readers through a decade of painstaking fieldwork examining
the significance of black-and-white striping and, after
systematically dismissing every hypothesis for these markings with
new data, he arrives at a surprising conclusion: zebra's markings
are nature's defense against biting fly annoyance. Popular
explanations for stripes range from camouflage to confusion of
predators, social facilitation, and even temperature regulation. It
is a challenge to test these proposals on large animals living in
the wild, but using a combination of careful observations, simple
field experiments, comparative information, and logic, Caro is able
to weigh up, scientifically, the pros and cons of each idea.
Eventually driven by experiments showing that biting flies avoid
landing on striped surfaces, observations that striping is most
intense where biting flies are abundant, and by his knowledge of
zebras' susceptibility to biting flies and vulnerability to the
diseases that flies carry Caro concludes that black-and-white
stripes are an adaptation to thwart biting fly attack. Not just a
tale of one scientist's quest to solve a classic mystery of
biology, Zebra Stripes is also a testament to the tremendous value
of longitudinal research in behavioral ecology, demonstrating how
observation, experiment, and comparative research can reshape our
understanding of the natural world.
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