Timothy M. Caro (born 1951) is a Britishevolutionary ecologist known for his work onconservation biology,animal behaviour,anti-predator defences in animals, and the function ofzebra stripes. He is the author of several textbooks on these subjects.
Caro was born in 1951 to artistsAnthony Caro andSheila Girling.[1][2] Caro gained his bachelor's degree inzoology atCambridge University in 1973, and his doctorate inpsychology at theUniversity of St Andrews in 1979. He was a professor of wildlife biology atUniversity of California, Davis, in the departments of population biology and wildlife and fish conservation biology. He is currently a professor of biology at theUniversity of Bristol. He has studied the colourpolymorphism ofcoconut crabs, theconservation of fragments offorest, and the function ofcoloration in mammals, especiallyzebra stripes.[3][4][5]
Caro's team found evidence that zebra stripes help to reduce biting bytabanid flies, but no reliable support for traditionally held hypotheses about the function of zebra stripes includingcamouflage,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 theTimes Higher Education, praised Caro's 2006 bookZebra Stripes as "an exemplary study", calling it "one long argument", a phrase used byDarwin of hisOn the Origin of Species, summarizing it as "in essence a 300-page scientific paper".[7] Karin Brulliard, writing inThe Washington Post under the headline "To figure out why the zebra got its stripes, this researcher dressed up like one", portrays Caro in a zebra costume "not used in his fieldwork", but also in a tailor-made striped suit in the Tanzanian bush, as well as in pelts of zebra and the unstriped wildebeest. The newspaper reports Caro as "absolutely convinced" that he has found the right explanation.[8]Matthew Cobb, writing inNew Scientist, recallsRudyard Kipling's children's book,Just So Stories, in which the zebra got his stripes by standing half-in, half-out of the shadows "with the slippery-slidy shadows of the trees" on his body. Cobb callsZebra 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."[9]Michael Lemonick, writing inThe New Yorker echoed the just-so-story theme.[10]
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