So, you think you know everything about zebras, huh? Well, get ready to have your mind blown by the incredible lifestyle and diet of the Mountain Zebra ( Equus zebra ). These majestic creatures, found in the vast grasslands and mountains of Africa, have a whole world of fascinating facts waiting to be discovered.
Zebras create a wide spectrum of vocalizations and sounds. The zebra has a distinctive tactile call (called “bark”), which sounds like “aha, aha, aha” or “kwaha, kawha, ha, ha. The Grévy’s zebra’s call has been described as “something like the growl of a hippopotamus combined with the whistle of a donkey, while the mountain zebra is relatively calm. Loud snorting in zebras is related to alarm.
Zebras are black with white stripes. The presence of stripes introduces an exceptionally assertive type of visual stimulation into the young animal’s world and this difference from other, un-striped animals is emphatically not trivial. Anyone who has watched zebras attentively will have become aware that eyes have to work overtime to accommodate to their every movement.
Zebra stripes are special like a person’s fingerprints. There are plains zebra, Grévy’s zebra and the mountain zebra.The plains zebra is the most common. The numbers of all three are shrinking because of habitat loss, hunting, and competition with livestock for water and their favorite food, grasses. In fact, zebras graze on grass so much that their teeth have to keep growing so they don’t wear out! Why do they even have stripes?
Zebras live in Africa.The best-known zebra is the plains zebra, which lives in the pastures and forests of eastern and southern Africa. Grévy’s Zebra has a highly discontinuous range, being found from the eastern side of the Rift Valley in Kenya to the Tana R. There is a small, isolated population east of the theAlledeghi Plains north-east of Awash N. P. in Ethiopia.
Zebras are plan eaters. The preferred forage is Aristida spp., Chrysopogonplumulosus, Dactyloctenium schindicum, Digitaria sp., Lasiurus scindicusand Sporobolus iocladus. Zebras are well adapted to eat herbs, have high-strength teeth, are very resistant, and the digestive system is very effective at extracting nutrients from grasses.
