Does painting a cow with a zebra stripe pattern help keep flies and other insects away from them? Could this strange paint job make cattle less stressed?
Japanese farmers discovered something wild – paint white stripes on black cows and flies basically ignore them. Sounds crazy, right? But this zebra-inspired hack is saving cattle from constant buzzing, biting, and stress. We’ll break down how this simple paint job mimics nature’s own fly-repelling design and why it might change how farms handle pest problems.
Insects are serious problems
It’s not a secret that bugs carry disease and can cause serious problems for animals and humans who get bitten by them. In addition to bugs biting cattle, the constant buzzing that cows and other farm animals have to deal with can be extremely annoying. This causes animals stress and leads to many farmers looking for fly control methods in order to protect these animals from the pests that buzz around and cause problems for the farmers and the cattle.
A Japanese team figured it out
A cattle farmer asked Kojima Tomoki from the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization what could be done to protect animals from biting insects. Kojima was inspired by a TV program that mentioned the effects a zebra’s stripes have, which is to keep many bugs away, creating a natural livestock protection method. This might not be one of the most common Japanese farming techniques, but painting zebra stripe patterns on cows has been shown to reduce the number of flies and other biting insects around cattle. This research won the team the lg Nobel Prize, with a bit of a parody award, which is given out to teams and researchers who make scientific discoveries that are a bit humorous but also make people think.
Using zebras at the starting point
Some functional hypotheses regarding the striped pattern on zebras have come up in various scientific studies. Many think that these stripes have various purposes, including camouflage, predator confusion, and the avoidance of biting flies. The link between biting flies and zebra stripes has been studied and shared, but it’s never been tried on other animals until recently. Zebra stripe cow painting could be a fantastic solution to the problem farmers face every day. Cows and other farm animals live outdoors, and flies and other biting insects spend their time on these animals and their feces, which can lead to trouble in the animals who can contract diseases from the biting insects.
A study in cattle pest management
The Japanese team that figured out that zebra stripe cow painting can reduce the number of flies around cattle did so by using this pattern and studying the impact on the animals. The team observed that cows with the striped paint job were bothered by flies about half as much as other cows. They used black Japanese cows and painted them with striped patterns. The painted cows not only had fewer flies on them, but they also engaged in fly-repelling actions much less than non-painted cows. These natural pest deterrents, such as waving their heads and stomping their legs, put stress on cows, and those that were painted did this much less than the non-painted.
Is this a permanent fix?
The agricultural innovation of zebra stripe cow painting seems strange and is certainly weird, but it is not a permanent fix. The team found that the paint on the cows wore off after only a few days, which means farmers would need to repaint the cows every few days, which would be time consuming and labor intensive. Still, this fix shows that using the black and white pattern that resembles a zebra is a great way to keep bugs off cattle, at least for a short time.
Another win for Japan
When it comes to the lg Nobel Prize, Japan seems to be collecting them regularly. This is the 19th year in a row that Japan has won at least one of them. For this year, ten research projects received such awards. Some of them include studies into what happens when narcissists or other people are told they are intelligent, and a study to find out what type of pizza lizards prefer.
What interesting things will teams come up with next year to win the lg Nobel Prize. Zebra stripe cow painting is much more than simply fun and humorous, but if a permanent fix is discovered, it could be an extremely useful insect deterrent.
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