Zebra Animals

Mammal. Zebras are members of the horse family, Equuleus  They live in family groups of more than a dozen zebras with one stallion as head. While zebras' stripes may look the same to us, each has a unique pattern that can be recognized by other family members. When zebras run as a herd, the stripes help protect them by confusing predators with a dizzying display. Zebras sleep in shifts, so that some members of the herd are always awake and alert. The leader uses sounds to signal when all is safe or when a threat occurs. This benefit may help an individual zebra in some situations, but the more significant means of protection has to do with zebra herds. Zebras usually travel in large groups, in which they stay very close to one another. Even with their camouflage pattern, it's highly unlikely a large gathering of zebras would be able to escape a lion's notice, but their stripes help them use this large size to their advantage. When all the zebras keep together as a big group, the patte­rn of each zebra's stripes blends in with the stripes of the zebras around it. This is confusing to the lion, who sees a large, moving, striped mass instead of many individual zebras. The lion has trouble picking out any one zebra, and so it doesn't have a very good plan of attack. It's hard for the lion to even recognize which way each zebra is moving: Imagine the difference in pursuing one animal and charging into an amorphous blob of animals moving every which way. The lion's inability to distinguish zebras also makes it more difficult for it to target and track weaker zebras in the herd.So do zebra stripes confuse zebras as much as they confuse lions? Oddly enough, while making zebras indistinguishable to other animals, zebra stripes actually help zebras recognize one another. Stripe patterns are like zebra fingerprints: Every zebra has a slightly different arrangement. Zoologists believe this is how zebras distinguish who's who in a zebra herd. This certainly has significant benefits. A zebra mare and her foal can keep track of each other in the large herd, for example, and a zebra can very quickly distinguish its own herd from another. This also helps human researchers, because it enables them to track particular zebras in the wild.