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Susanne Åkesson, a biologist at Lund University in Sweden, refutes the theory that zebras have striped fur to stay cool under the sun burning. This badumption is false, she and her colleagues show in a study recently published in Scientific Reports .
There has been a continuing debate among researchers, going back to Darwin, about why zebras have their black signature and white stripes
One of the many theories is that it keeps them cool in the sun. The black stripes become warmer than the white areas, and the theory indicates that it creates small vortices when the warmer air above the dark fur meets the colder air above the fur. white. According to the theory, these vortices act as a fan to cool the body.
To test this theory, researchers fill water with large metal barrels and cover them with skin imitations of different colors: black and white, black, white, brown and gray stripes. They then placed the barrels in the sun and later measured the temperature in each barrel. Not surprisingly, black was the hottest and the coolest white. The striped and gray barrels were similar, and in these the temperature did not go down.
"The stripes did not lower the temperature Susanne Åkesson
Eight years ago, she and her Hungarian and Spanish colleagues presented another theory that the shiny fur acts as an optical protection against haemophagous horseflies and other biting insects Aphids are attracted by polarized light, the kind of light that appears when the sun's rays are reflected on a dark surface. white surface, there will be no polarized light – hence the protection.
Susanne Åkesson, the Hungarian physicist Gábor Horváth and his colleagues received the Ig Nobel Prize for their research on polarized light , horseflies and why these hematophagous insects disturb dark horses much more than white horses.
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