koryos:

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acceptableduraz:

zarekthelordofthefries:

Not to critique evolution, but I would think orange and black stripes wouldn’t be as good for camouflage in a forest as, say, green and black would.

It turns out a lot of animals can’t see the difference between orange and green!  Elephants, for instance, have dichromatic vision (two types of cones, rather than three like most humans.) 

Check out this diagram from ResearchGate.  It deals with the color vision of horses, who are also generally dichromatic.  (I think, though I’m not sure, that zebras would have the same color vision as horses.)  See how orange and green look to them?

Not to critique evolution but I think prey animals should be better at telling when their predator is dressed like a traffic cone.

It doesn’t matter what zebras see, because tigers are not native to Africa and do not naturally hunt zebra.  Tigers are Asian and mostly hunt animals like deer, elk, and buffalo.  These aren’t animals with great color vision.  They don’t need to have it because they don’t eat fruit and so don’t need to know when the berry is ripe vs when it’s not.  Good color vision is too expensive to have if you don’t need it.  Deer put their vision stats in a wide field of vision that is sensitive to motion, low light capabilities, and possibly seeing UV light.  They don’t have great color and lack a lot of acuity, but have a great sense of smell and good hearing.  That’s way more useful if you’re prey.  Deer see well in the blue end of the color spectrum and less well in the red.  This makes sense because deer are most active in the dawn and dusk periods, when there is more blue in the light.  Tigers are taking advantage of deer eyesight by being orange.

We see tigers are being obviously colored because tigers are fruit colored to our tree ape brains.

I don’t know what the best part of this is: implying that deer chose their attributes on a character sheet, or the fact that we get to see tiger colors because they look like a snack.

Not to mention, in general the forests tigers live in go through dry seasons, turning much of the brush pale gold, so orange is actually not a bad choice.

(photo by Art Wolfe)

But either way, the main point of tiger camouflage isn’t blending in via it’s coloration, it’s actually a combination of disruptive coloration and countershading. Disruptive coloration uses boldly contrasting colors to break up the shape of an animal’s outline, as shown in this image by Hugh Cott:

It’s much harder to resolve the movement of a tiger as “TIGER!!” compared to grass or branches swaying in the wind this way.

In addition, countershading is another camouflage strategy the tiger employs. It’s darker-colored on its back and lighter-colored on its belly. This is because when light falls on objects, it illuminates their top halves, while shadow falls on and darkens the lower half. Animals with the same top and bottom colors will therefore stand out from the background, because of the shadows cast on their legs and belly. Countershading helps to ‘flatten’ the silhouette of an animal by disguising these shadows. If that confuses you, check out this figure by Ian Alexander:

Both these strategies work whether the foliage is green or brown, because the tiger’s camouflage doesn’t need to be perfect- just confusing enough to let it get close.