They have been very successful at breeding zebra with very little striping. The Quagga Project was started more than 20 years ago with 18 wild founder zebra and has been breeding zebra for four generations in an effort to bring back the minimally striped phenotype of the quagga subspecies. We also will take advantage of something rarely available for studies of this sort – a captive population that has been under human-mediated selection for a trait that is exhibited in the wild. To identify genes responsible for stripe variation, we are sampling in several wild populations, including some with fully striped zebra and others with zebra with less striping. Working with collaborators at UCLA and elsewhere, I am taking advantage of this stripe variation to study both the genetic basis (how) and adaptive reasons (why) for zebra stripes. The extinct quagga subspecies only had stripes to the shoulder. Fortunately, plains zebra show a lot of variation in stripe pattern that we can make use of, including populations with zebra that are fully striped from head to toe and others in which zebra have few or no stripes on their legs. ![]() If all zebra looked alike we would have no easy way of understanding how stripes evolved – what genes code for stripes or what ecological forces have selected for stripes. Variation is an important key to understanding how and why zebra stripes evolved. Have you ever wondered why zebra have stripes? There are many hypotheses, including crypsis, predator confusion, thermoregulation, and avoidance of tsetse fly bites (through which a trypanosome causing sleeping sickness is transmitted), but no one really knows the answer.
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