Image courtecy of Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0
Joel Kontinen
How did the tiger get its stripes? According to the British nobelist Rudyard Kipling who stated in 1902 collection Just So Stories for Little Children. The tales were light-hearted explanations of how animals got a certain trait, as the names of the stories indicate, for instance How the Leopard got His Spots or How the Camel got his Hump..
According to Live Science, “Tiger stripes vary between
individuals, much like fingerprints in humans. The markings play an important
role in helping a tiger remain hidden while hunting prey. The stripes help
break up the blend in with tall grass.”
It goes on the say, “in 1952, the British
Mathematician Alan Turing theorized that a chemical reaction between two
homogeneous substances were responsible for the famous tiger-stripe pattern,
along with other patterns commonly found in nature. He dubbed these substances
"morphogens." One acted as an "activator" and the other as
an "inhibitor" — with the "activator" causing a stripe to
form and the "inhibitor" creating a blank space.
And, “In 2012, a study in the journal Nature
Genetics experimentally validated this theory by identifying the
morphogens at play in the formation of ridge patterns in the mouths of mice.”
This is according to Darwinian storytelling, with no
strings attached to the truth.
Source:
How 10 animals evolved their iconic features | Live Science 6 January.
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