Doesnt this study just imply that paint repels mosquitos? If they wanted to disprove that I don’t see why they wouldnt use black paint instead of what they did which was using black cows. If you paint a black cow black, and it gets bit less, that would sort of give it away wouldnt it?
Like other insects, I believe flies orient themselves with light. Striped surfaces like this would cause some confusion with that. There’s a few studies around about flight paths and light/surfaces around, if there’s any interest I’ll do a rummage. Light reflects, black absorbs remember. Very good for controlled contrast.
I get its supposed to be a sort of camouflage, but the group that had the best results also happened to be the only one that had stripes and a full cover of paint.
The one concern I have with the other types of tests is that I’m not sure flies are attracted to non-animal surfaces in the same way. But then again I don’t know the mechanism of how a fly targets where to go and then how it gets there navigationally.
If you paint a black cow black, and it gets bit less, that would sort of give it away wouldnt it?
They already did sorta do that. One of the three groups was painted black on black, albeit with stripes. Those were bitten as much as the unpainted black cows.
To take it to the furthest conclusion I’d paint them entirely in black, and entirely in white (in case there’s something different between the white and black paint besides the color).
Oh interesting I think I misread that middle group, I thought it was white stripes. I’ll have to go back over it when I have the time to look at the details. I agree with your last point though.
The treatments were black-and-white painted stripes, black painted stripes, and no stripes (all-black body surface). Recorded fly-repelling behaviors were head throw, ear beat, leg stamp, skin twitch, and tail flick. Photo images of the right side of each cow were taken using a commercial digital camera after every observation and biting flies on the body and each leg were counted from the photo images. Here we show that the numbers of biting flies on Japanese Black cows painted with black-and-white stripes were significantly lower than those on non-painted cows and cows painted only with black stripes
Doesnt this study just imply that paint repels mosquitos? If they wanted to disprove that I don’t see why they wouldnt use black paint instead of what they did which was using black cows. If you paint a black cow black, and it gets bit less, that would sort of give it away wouldnt it?
Like other insects, I believe flies orient themselves with light. Striped surfaces like this would cause some confusion with that. There’s a few studies around about flight paths and light/surfaces around, if there’s any interest I’ll do a rummage. Light reflects, black absorbs remember. Very good for controlled contrast.
I get its supposed to be a sort of camouflage, but the group that had the best results also happened to be the only one that had stripes and a full cover of paint.
The one concern I have with the other types of tests is that I’m not sure flies are attracted to non-animal surfaces in the same way. But then again I don’t know the mechanism of how a fly targets where to go and then how it gets there navigationally.
They already did sorta do that. One of the three groups was painted black on black, albeit with stripes. Those were bitten as much as the unpainted black cows.
To take it to the furthest conclusion I’d paint them entirely in black, and entirely in white (in case there’s something different between the white and black paint besides the color).
Oh interesting I think I misread that middle group, I thought it was white stripes. I’ll have to go back over it when I have the time to look at the details. I agree with your last point though.
The study says that zebra markings repels flies.
It says at most that paint over skin will reduce mosquitos biting. Unless there is more expounded up in the study that was left out here.