Looks like this is the study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6776349/
You're a hero.
FYI if this sort of study is your thing, Temple Grandin published her studies as a volume and they're quite good reading. More of them delve into human psychology than you'd think for someone who's famous for working with animals. Source: I paged through it while waiting in a book store
In the cited study with buckets, it was shown that striped and spotted surfaces attract fewer flies.
That makes me think if Nguni cattle
have an easier time with those pests.If yes, that would be another plus for hardy landraces in place of overengineered, capitalmaxxed breeds.
I'm going on holiday to Cambodia in February. Guess I'll bring my body paint supplies and run around in war stripes over my body.
now that the song is playing forcefully in my brain i'm going to make you suffer with me
Don't forget to pack a wife.
YESSS BEAT ME TO IT LMAO
Can confirm, insects are drawn to brightness
Luckily my soul is dark and bitter.
Good for their physical health, but not great for their personal goals and expectations.
Why has evolution let these cows down?
I mean, we kind of hijacked evolution in favor of hypergrowth and ludicrous gazongas a long time ago.
Hippity, hoppity. Your natural selection is now my property!
I'm about to start dressing like beetlejuice
Reminds me of a donkey I saw in Mexico painted like a zebra trying to trick tourists
Sure, but there's also the secondary market of people who think it's hilarious to get a photo with a donkey painted like a zebra to trick tourists. Lean into it a bit, like wrestling, it could be fun.
After 10 Pacificos I will in fact be leaning
This is no donkey painted like a zebra, it's a majestic hybrid zonkey. Just 5 dollars to take a photo, or 3 for $10.
I’ll come back after 10 Pacificos
If they figure out if it's the white stripes or black stripes that do the trick they could reach 100%.
Source? I'm curious to read about this. How do they know the paint didn't do it? Another comment here said that spots also do the trick, so if you have two cows in the same field, one spotted and one solid colored, is the solid colored cow getting 2x as many flies? Do the stripes still work when surrounded by other cows who don't have stripes? So many questions!
This is why we need the paper linked with the meme. It seems obvious that a fly would prefer skin to paint.
I like to see what you guys can find when you dig around. ;)
How do they know the paint didn't do it?
There were 3 groups of black cows: an unpainted control group, a black stripe group painted with black stripes (not very visible because the cows were already black), and a black and white painted group. The control group had similar results to the black stripe group, which suggests that the black paint alone didn't do anything.
So further research could be to compare to an all black painted group and an all white painted group, with no unpainted fur, as well. If it's the pattern, then one would expect the totally painted cattle of either paint color would see similar results as unpainted.
Brilliant, thanks!
Some horse fly blankets and hoods have a zebra pattern, probably for the same reason.
I first read function as in mathemetical function, now I wonder, what the avarege zebras stripes function is
Pedantic warning: it’s not a conventional function, cuz it’d be multivalued for any given input no matter where you put the axes lol
Moobra
That's where Hershey's Cookies and Cream chocolate bars are from!
What if the flies just hated the smell of the paint lol
If you say Beeflejuice three times....
See, some people think forcible sterilization is never acceptable, and yet we have multiple comments from people that didn't read the study asking if the authors thought of something.
Maybe you'd know if you were literate.
You can have your balls back if you do your homework.
This thread is like a Reddit/Lemmy Smart Guy combo. People who just assume paid researchers didn't consider this extremely basic thing they learned about in high school, and also hinting at IQ-based eugenics
Interesting. A while ago, I read that zebra stripes were meant to confuse predators. Basically, the idea was that when they ran as a herd, their stripes made it difficult to tell where one zebra ended and the other began. I wonder if that's considered bunk now or if this is supposed to be an additional benefit.
Sure, that it wasn't the smell of the paint, that drove the insects away?
If you look at the study you can see that they also had a treatment of black stripes on black cows to control for just that:
The cows were assigned to treatments using a 3 × 3 Latin-square design. The treatments consisted of black-and-white painted stripes (B&W), black painted stripes (B), and no stripes (CONT) as a control (Fig 1).
Do zebras smell of paint?
This doesn't help very much.
Can't wait to see this in British fields whenever I venture outside the basement!
Awesome. Now narrow down the mechanism with further research.
Yay, more animal abuse.
how exactly is painting a cow animal abuse? I'm curios
