In a past discussion, we mentioned there were multiple types of Zebras, and I mentioned I might explain later why they have stripes.
In school you might have learned zebras have stripes because it is hard for predators to tell the difference between individual animals, so it is hard to pick one out.
Or you might have heard it is because it allows them to blend in to tall grasses since most predators are color-blind.
Recently scientists found a much stronger reason. Fly control!
It turns out that horses and most other animals that are in the same regions as Zebras have thicker coats, but the Zebra has a thin coat, so God gave them a different defense.
Flies see the world different than we do. The pattern on a zebra ends up looking somewhat like this lined image does to us:
Pretty disorienting right!?!
Turns out the more thin that the stripes are, the better control there is.
If we look back at the Planes Zebra, note that on their face and legs the stripes are thinner, so better to control where their skin is thinner.
Remember Grevy’s Zebra with thinner stripes? Where they live, there is a worse fly problem than where other Zebras live, so they need even better control.
Here are two verses that talk about God providing for animals.
- Psalms 50: 10 “For every beast of the forest is Mine, The cattle on a thousand hills. 11 “I know every bird of the mountains, and everything that moves in the field is Mine. 12 …For the world is Mine, and all it contains.
- Luke 12:24: Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap; they have no storeroom nor barn, and yet God feeds them; how much more valuable you are than the birds!
It’s interesting to see the different ways that God planned for what each specific animal would need, things we are only now starting to figure out. If God planned so well for animals, how much better He would have planned for us!
© Vivian P. Kirkpatrick, 2015