Tim Caro

He has studied the colour polymorphism of coconut crabs, the conservation of fragments of forest, and the function of coloration in mammals, especially zebra stripes.

[3][4][5] Caro's team found evidence that zebra stripes help to reduce biting by tabanid flies, but no reliable support for traditionally held hypotheses about the function of zebra stripes including camouflage, predator avoidance, heat management, or social interaction.

[6] He evaluated 18 different proposed explanations for the stripes, devising and carrying out quantitative tests to compare them.

The evolutionary ecologist Tim Birkhead, writing in the Times Higher Education, praised Caro's 2006 book Zebra Stripes as "an exemplary study", calling it "one long argument", a phrase used by Darwin of his On the Origin of Species, summarizing it as "in essence a 300-page scientific paper".

Cobb calls Zebra Stripes a marvellous book and predicts it will encourage a generation to "tackle evolutionary biology's remaining enigmas, with or without the help of Kipling.

Caro investigated some 18 hypotheses to explain why zebras are striped, excluding all but one of them through experimental studies.