斑马条纹-拒蚊虫于千里之外.docVIP

斑马条纹:拒蚊虫于千里之外斑马是马科动物中比较招人喜爱的一个成员，事实上它也是最古老的成员之一。尽管斑马看起来比普通的马和驴要更具异域风情，但其实它的外形更接近早期的马科动物祖先。 但是，斑马为什么会进化出其标志性的黑白相间条纹，这是科学家们近几十年一直在争论的话题。传统观点认为斑马的黑白条纹可以使他们隐藏在高的草丛中不被发现——这也是躲避狮子好方法，因为狮子是色盲。但是有最新研究表明，这种黑白相间的条纹也扰乱了另外一种体型更微小的叮咬者——吸血马蝇——的视线。 Horseflies, the females of which feed on blood, are attracted to polarized light—light waves that are oriented in a particular direction and that we experience as glare. This glare lures the bugs most likely because it resembles light reflected off water, where they lay their eggs. On horses, black fur reflects polarized light better than brown or white, as evolutionary ecologist and colleagues Susanne Akesson found in a previous study. After experiments in which her team measured the number of horseflies that became trapped on gluey, striped boards or models of horses, the team found that the flies?favorite is the black coat and zebra stripes are the best fly repellent4—the narrower the stripes the better. The result may help explain why zebras? skinniest stripes are on their faces and legs. “That?s also the place where you have the thinnest skin,” said Akesson. But why would striped skin be more effective than white, which has the lowest reflectivity of polarized light? The black-and-white pattern, Akesson said, turns out to be“ideal in its function of disrupting this signal of reflected polarized light.” Because the coat reflects light in alternately polarized and nonpolarized patterns, the zebra “is more difficult to single out relative to the surroundings.” It is, in effect, camouflaged to flies as well as to big cats. Then a question naturally comes to us. If stripes truly are Kryptonite to horseflies, why don?t horses—close evolutionary relatives to zebras—sport the pattern too? 5 The answer may be in the fact that there are more horseflies, and more horsefly species, in Africa compared to more temperate regions. Zebras would have been under more pressure to evolve a deterrent6. Another obvious quest