Sometimes, an innocent and seemingly stupid question about the stripes on a zebra can spark a student’s creativity.
Here is the work of my student Dirk on the above topic. Have fun reading!
A million years ago, zebras looked very similar to horses. A large herd moved north, the rest stayed in Africa. It snowed in the north, and in the snow the light zebras had a better chance of survival than the dark ones. In the end, only white zebras remained in the north. In Africa, it was the other way around. The enemies hunted zebras at night, and eventually only black zebras survived. This went on for a long time, until one day polar bears appeared in the north and competed with the zebras. The bears became more and more numerous until finally the white zebras fled south and returned to Africa. One day they met their white cousins again. At first they had difficulties, but after a while they had offspring. Of course, the children had all the combinations of white and black colors, and there was a lot of disorder in the herd. Who should be the leader of the herd? The white zebras voted for the whitest, and the black zebras, of course, chose the blackest. In the end, the community decided on the zebra with two black and two white stripes, as it was the blackest (twice) and the whitest (also twice). This chief had priority in the choice of partners and fathered the most children. After a few years, more and more zebras lived with black and white stripes. The stripes were not yet straight and parallel, but the tradition developed that the chief was always the one who had the most stripes. But it had to be individual stripes. Also, it was too difficult to calculate the number if the stripes were too irregular. A thousand years later, zebras had between four and ten stripes, and the regularity of the stripes became very important. A zebra with such a mess on its back had no chance of finding a woman or a man, and two or three thousand years later, all zebras looked like they do today. That’s why zebras have stripes.
Dirk Caspary
