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Comment by andrewl | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting. I’d always assumed the stripes were camouflage, similar to a tiger’s stripes. Tigers look orange and black to us, but many prey animals perceive color differently, and the tiger’s stripes help it blend in among jungle foliage. The photos in this short article demonstrate the effect:

https://theconversation.com/why-do-tigers-have-stripes-14522...

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I had always heard the stripes were camouflage not to blend in with the environment, but to blend in with the herd - to make it hard for a predator to single one out

Tigers are not herd animals that are preyed on by other predators, though :-).

Indeed.

Tigers have evolved stripes for camouflage in grass.

Specifically because the animals are dichromats and cannot see the colour of the tigers' fur against the green of the grass because their colour reception is not sufficient.

https://www.iflscience.com/we-now-know-why-tigers-bright-ora...

I meant zebras

Which is why we do science on things that seem obvious - because while the obvious answer to something is, quite often, the correct one, it isn't always.

I would imagine the orange with black stripes of a tiger are much more effective camouflage around dawn and dusk when the sun is low, shadows are long, and the colour temperature of light shifts towards the orange and red end of the spectrum.

This is not at all correct, simply because their prey cannot perceive orange at all. Tigers do not look orange to their prey. This is the same reason hunting vests are orange: The prey animals in question cannot pick orange out of a green scene.

Distracive camouflage.

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