Sunday, January 24, 2016

Zebra Stripes - what are they for?

A bunch of stories about how zebra stripes do not provide camouflage as had been thought - so the purpose of the stripes is unclear. My two cents are: it is hard to look at a zebra and very difficult to judge where the edge of it is because normal visual edge detection is (if nothing else is) seriously disrupted when the object with "edges" has stripes that match the back of the eye/cortical zone striping - there is a resonance that is painful. Since it is hard to see the edge of a zebra, it is hard to jump on the right part of it, during the hunt. So: stripes fool strikes.
Update: not much excuse for failure to identify zebra stripes as matching visual cortical striping.

No comments:

Post a Comment