Striped bodypainting protects against horseflies.

Gábor Horváth,György Kriska,Susanne Åkesson,Ádám Pereszlényi

doi:10.1098/rsos.181325

Gábor Horváth, György Kriska + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.181325

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Abstract

Bodypainting is widespread in African, Australian and Papua New Guinean indigenous communities. Many bodypaintings use white or bright yellow/grey/beige stripes on brown skin. Where the majority of people using bodypainting presently live, blood-sucking horseflies are abundant, and they frequently attack the naked brown regions of the human body surface with the risk of transmitting the pathogens of dangerous diseases. Since horseflies are deterred by the black and white stripes of zebras, we hypothesized that white-striped paintings on dark brown human bodies have a similar effect. In a field experiment in Hungary, we tested this hypothesis. We show that the attractiveness to horseflies of a dark brown human body model significantly decreases, if it is painted with the white stripes that are used in bodypaintings. Our brown human model was 10 times more attractive to horseflies than the white-striped brown model, and a beige model, which was used as a control, attracted two times more horseflies than the striped brown model. Thus, white-striped bodypaintings, such as those used by African and Australian people, may serve to deter horseflies, which is an advantageous byproduct of these bodypaintings that could lead to reduced irritation and disease transmission by these blood-sucking insects.

Highlights

Members of different tribes living in Africa, Australia, Papua New Guinea and North America frequently painted their brown naked body surfaces with white or bright yellow/grey/beige stripes [1,2,3,4,5,6]
There is good evidence that (i) horizontally polarizing water attracts male and female horseflies, (ii) strongly polarizing host animals attract female horseflies, (iii) striped/ spotted targets are unattractive to horseflies and (iv) striped bodypainting is common in many indigenous tribal communities
These factors lead to the following hypotheses that we test here: (1) Dark humans with striped bodypaintings may be less attractive to horseflies than homogeneous darkor lighter-skinned humans

Summary

Introduction

Members of different tribes living in Africa, Australia, Papua New Guinea and North America frequently painted their brown naked body surfaces with white or bright yellow/grey/beige stripes [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Are used as body decoration, for emotional expression or as marks to signify personal identity and/ or group affiliation [16,17]. The stripes of these bodypaintings are similar to the stripes occurring on the pelage of zebras and okapis. Cultural reasons may determine their designs [18,19], but it has been suggested that they could serve a function in heat regulation or as camouflage [20,21]

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