They were biting at each other’s necks, and Rubenstein said that zebras, like other equids, can also deliver a fierce kick to anyone who might be pestering them. He played a video of two wild donkeys having a fight. In any case, Rubenstein said, people should not approach them. In the wild zebras have thrived on the frigid slopes of Mount Kenya, while the animals could also choose to migrate south. And in the Maryland countryside there’s plenty of grass.”Īs grazers, zebras will feel at home in Maryland, says Professor Daniel Rubenstein: ‘They’re fine.’ Photograph: Slávek Růta/Rex/ShutterstockĮven in winter, when the average low in Upper Marlboro is around 32F (0C), Rubenstein said the zebras would be OK. They browse a little, but 90% of their diet is grass. “Horses, the three species of zebra, two species of ass, they’re all basically grazers. While observers might think Maryland would prove challenging to a five-strong dazzle of zebras, Rubenstein said it was quite the opposite. He has studied the behavior and ecology of all wild equids and is among the foremost zebra academics, most recently researching how the animals’ stripes might help them regulate body temperature. “I don’t have a lot of real world zebra experience.”ĭaniel Rubenstein, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, very much is an expert. Greenwald confessed, however, that he was not an expert. “In Florida I went to this cool zoo,” he said. Greenwald, 34, said he had had a previous encounter with a zebra. “This is the first time,” Greenwald said when asked if he had heard of zebras roaming Upper Marlboro before. Jason Greenwald, who was waiting for a real estate auction to begin, had learned about the escaped zebras from Twitter. The story of the striped equids breaking loose has seemingly provided a tonic in these troubled times, and it was certainly all anyone wanted to talk about at Prince George’s county courthouse, in the center of town, one morning last week. For all these chance sightings, however, the zebras have proved difficult to capture, in part because they can run very fast – a trick that usually helps them survive on the African savannah rather than suburban America. Locals have shared photos and videos of the zebras roaming people’s lawns and gardens south of Upper Marlboro. Keeping track of such equine aberrations is useful to science as part of a broader goal to monitor changes in species and how they’re managed by local communities.Those achievements have been overshadowed in recent weeks, however, and instead it is the whereabouts of five zebras, which broke free from a local farm at the end of August, that has dominated conversation. Zebras also experience other unusual color variations, such as partial albinism, which was seen in an extremely rare "blond" zebra photographed earlier this year in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. (See pictures of zebras in National Geographic.) Tira and these other foals have a condition called pseudomelanism, a rare genetic mutation in which animals display some sort of abnormality in their stripe pattern, says Ren Larison, a biologist studying the evolution of zebra stripes at the University of California, Los Angeles. Similar foals have been seen in Botswana’s Okavango Delta. Zebra stripes are as unique as fingerprints, but Tira’s odd coloration could be the first recorded observation in the Masai Mara, according to Liu. Antony Tira, a Maasai guide who first spotted the foal, named him Tira. “At first glance he looked like a different species altogether,” Liu says. Photographer Frank Liu was on the search for rhinos recently when he noticed the eye-catching plains zebra, likely about a week old. Talk about a horse of another color-a zebra foal with a dark coat and white polka dots has been spotted in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve.
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