For most people, the word Zebra brings up images of a black and white striped animal. However, a baby zebra with a rare polka dots pattern instead of stipes has got people talking.
Zebra foal with a dark coat and white polka dots in Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya is named Tira after the photographer Antony Tira who spotter it back in 2019.
In 2019, the eye-catching zebra was likely about a week old when he was spotted by a group of photographers on the lookout for rhinos.
Photographer Frank Liu recalled, “at first glance, it appeared to be a whole other species."
Antony Tira, a Maasai guide and photographer at the Reserve's Matira Bush Camp who named the zebra told a Kenyan media outlet, "At first, I assumed it was a zebra that had been captured and painted or marked for the purposes of (researching) migration." “When I first saw it, I was puzzled. In the park, there is a general rule that whoever discovers a significant animal gets to name it.”
Like human fingerprints, zebra stripes are one-of-a-kind. Tira's unusual colour, on the other hand, represents Masai Mara's first documented sighting.
The polka dot appearance is caused by a hereditary condition known as pseudo-melanism, in which animals' stripe patterns are distorted.
Also Read: The Cognitive Benefits of Playing Poker
“I'm not sure where the term pseudo-melanism came from, but I think it's fair to say it's a popular and undefined term that refers to extremely rare animals that have an apparent abnormality in the stripe pattern process, for example, light stripes are absent from much of the trunk and back but are more common on the extremities,” said geneticist Greg Barsh, a faculty investigator at the Hudson Institute.
Mr Tira took pictures of the unusually marked zebra foal and shared them on the Matira Bush Camp's Facebook page. The images, according to sources drew a lot of attention and sparked a human "stampede" in the reserve.
This foal had caught everyone's interest. Tour guides were promptly hired to bring tourists and photographers to the viewpoint location where the newborn zebra and his mother might be found.