1/29/2024 0 Comments Stripes on human skin![]() ![]() But if our mother and our father are brother and sister, then we have a good chance of having a lot of the same genes that both came from grandpa, and a lot of the same genes that both came from grandma.Īnd so we might get … the same copy of the same gene from … either one of your grandparents. We get a copy of the same genes from our mother and our father, right. What's happening in places where you see more individuals that are showing these odd patterns is that those populations have higher levels of inbreeding. Larison is an assistant adjunct professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. But if they have two copies of that version of the gene, then they're not normally striped. In other words, you need to have two copies of the same version of the gene that causes it in order to see that expressed in the individual.Īn individual could have one copy of and be perfectly normally striped. We've been trying to figure out what genetically causes the pattern, and so our suspicion has been that it's a recessive trait. And there's one in Rwanda that maybe has 10 per cent of the population with these spotted types of patterns. So you've got maybe five per cent of the population. Whereas … you could go to a park in Uganda called Lake Mburo, which has maybe about 150, 200 zebras, and see five or six of them, you know. If you think about Etosha National Park in Namibia, which has probably 30,000 zebras, you can go on a trip and spend a week, as I have done, going throughout the entire park and see one or two. It's fairly rare to see, but in some populations it is increasing. How common is it that there would be these aberrations in the coats of zebras? And those ones I don't have any samples of as yet, but those are probably the most rare ones to see. The bodies … look like they're black with white stripes on the legs and then more of a polka dot body. I think I remember a few years ago seeing … a photo of a foal that they were describing as having polka dots rather than stripes. Larison says researchers suspect that these abnormal zebra patterns are a recessive trait. So they look very strange.Ī zebra with unique spots in the middle of its body. But these animals look as if the stripes kind of started growing in the middle of their torso and tried to spread outward to the extremities, but got stuck.Īnd so they have these odd, mottled, weird looking stripes, a lot of black on their body, and their legs and face are almost all white with just the tiniest strips of black. The ones that we studied have spots on the saddle or kind of faded area on the saddle instead of stripes.Īnother type is what we call pseudo-melanistic, because melanism causes a pure black animal. Some people have probably seen the blond ones in the news, as we call them, which just have blond coloured stripes instead of black. So describe what a zebra without those stripes looks like. She spoke with The Current's Matt Galloway about her research.Ī lot of people have an idea of what a zebra looks like. The International Union for Conservation of Nature estimated there were about 500,000 plains zebras as of 2016. ![]() Habitat fragmentation happens when a large habitat area is broken up into smaller areas by human-made developments like fences or roads.Īccording to the study, the total population of plains zebras has declined by about 25 per cent since 2002. The researchers say it could be a consequence of habitat fragmentation. They found increased levels of inbreeding among zebra populations with unusual patterns on their coats. In a study published in the journal Molecular Ecology, Brenda Larison and other researchers looked at DNA from 140 plains zebras across Africa, including seven with abnormal stripes. A biologist studying abnormal stripe patterns in zebras says humans could be partly to blame for their strange look - and that it could be an early sign of problems for the species. ![]()
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