But a bunch of striped animals milling about together can make it hard to figure out where one zebra ends and the next one begins. It helps camouflage the animal, which sounds absurd at first since there’s nothing quite as eye-catching as a zebra. Each zebra’s stripe pattern is as unique as a fingerprint.Ī zebra’s stripes serve several purposes. It eats grass and other tough plants and lives in small herds. It typically grows a little over four feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.3 meters, or about 12 hands high if you are measuring it the way you measure its close relation, the horse. The common plains zebra is one of three species alive today, with a number of subspecies. ![]() Zebras live in parts of southern Africa on grasslands and savannas in both tropical and temperate areas. Not only that, underneath the zebra’s hair, its skin is black. The white fur grows from cells that contain less pigment than cells that grow black hair. It develops its stripes late in its development, when skin cells form the pigments that will give the hair its color. When a zebra embryo is developing inside its mother, its coat is entirely black. So when a rare zebra is born with spots instead of stripes, the spots are white on a black background. Zebras aren’t white with black stripes, they’re black with white stripes. You’d think that it would be the black stripes that would end up as black spots on a white background.īut, it turns out, we’re looking at zebras wrong. The only problem is, the spots on the zebra are white on a black background. But if a genetic mutation causes the ordinary striped pattern to be broken up, it can look like spots, or in some individuals narrow streaks. ![]() Zebras, of course, are famous for their black and white stripes. The foal has been nicknamed Tira after its discoverer. ![]() Instead of the familiar black and white stripes of other zebras, with white belly, the foal was black all over except for small white spots. A spotted zebra was photographed in a herd of ordinary plains zebras in Zambia in 1968, and much more recently, in September of 2019, a spotted zebra foal was photographed in Kenya.Ī tour guide named Antony Tira in the Masai Mara National Reserve saw an unusual-looking zebra foal in the herd. They’re very rare but it’s well documented. Spotted zebras are occasionally, uh, spotted in the wild. So that episode will be next week, and instead this week we’re going to learn about the mysterious spotted zebra. This episode was going to be another listener suggestion, but I left my flash drive at work that has all my research and the half-written script on it. SOMEONE forgot their flash drive at work, so here’s a short but hopefully interesting episode about a mystery animal, a zebra with spots instead of stripes! Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:53 - 8.0MB)
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