zebra

A zebra’s black-and-white stripes resemble a barcode–now biologists are USING them that way, to identify individual zebras from a photo. In StripeSpotter, a scientist draws a rectangle around an image of the zebra’s side in a photo, then this part of the image is automatically sliced into a number of bands. Each zebra’s "barcode" is then entered into a database, so individual zebras can be identified from photos–an ideal way to keep track of the herd.read more