Did they study the paint chemicals themselves to see if that by itself was a natural bug repellant?
Did they check if the paint chemicals are even safe for cows?
🤔
What if it’s just the white stripes (not the band)? Do white cows have the same number of flies? What if you paint them with black stripes?
Maybe those are answered in the article, but I’ll never read it.
LOL, same. Not worth the reading time. Any which way you twist it, there’s still probably way too many unknown factors.
I haven’t read the study, but most of these would need a placebo group, so divide the herd into thirds, one with no paint, one with stripes, and one fully painted white to get a baseline for each group. Also would be good to randomize which group each cow goes in each day so to rule out one cow who is especially tasty to flies.
Those groups also have another characteristic that changes: the amount of the cow covered in paint.
How do you determine if its that vs the stripes or colors?
What if you actually read the study before asking questions 😅😜🤔
A control group where they mix the colors together and paint them grey would answer that
Can a biting fly even penetrate paint, to consume that precious bovine blood?
I’ve not seen the study referenced, but if I were doing it I’d have cows I painted with white paint, white stripes, black paint, and a control I left unpainted.
This study is posted in another comment here, but they left out the black paint group.
Yes, obviously. But are the flies possibly repelled by the paint? Are the flies even able to bite through the paint?
Edit: 50% stripes, 50% reduction in bug bites.
Coincidence? I think not.
Somebody posted the study in this thread if you’re curious
Fair enough. But I’m in no rush to paint myself or my dog, and I lost the last cow I ever had over the Rainbow Bridge…
Tha smartest mother fucker in the room
What is the burger tie for? To repel hippies?
No it’s to wipe the sauce off his chin after finishing a burger!
What that second burger tie for O.o
That’s for modesty!
What is America known for? Burgers and prisons
Little kids think haha funny burgler, adults shudder and cry
adults shudder and cry
Swiper, no swiping!
Sorry, totally unknown reference to me
No, that’s just to look cool
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.
So, I was able to convince a coworker that I had a friend who worked at our nearby zoo, and that my friend let me in on the secret that zebras aren’t real, they’re just horses painted to look like that, “big zoo is lying to us to get our money,” you know.
Well, long story short I’m gonna need to steal this image from you and crop it, thanks.
Good for their physical health, but not great for their personal goals and expectations.
I’m pretty sure this study shows that paint repels mosquitos. Not much else.
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.
I’m about to start dressing like beetlejuice
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!
In most places flies are more nuisances than actual threats to large mammals. But then, there are the tsé-tsé flies…
[Edit : Had previously written “horses” instead of “flies” by accident]
tse-tse horses would be terrifying.
True, but what I actually wrote was calling horses a nuisance.
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!
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!
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
HEy aMIgO!! Lemme ride the ZOnKey!! VAMANOS! Cien pesos!!hiccup
I first read function as in mathemetical function, now I wonder, what the avarege zebras stripes function is
What if the flies just hated the smell of the paint lol
Why are the top comments in a science community so proudly anti-intellectual?
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.
