caro's team found evidence that zebra stripes help to reduce biting by tabanid flies, but no reliable support for traditionally held hypotheses about the function of zebra stripes including camouflage, predator avoidance, heat management, or social interaction. 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 the "times higher education", praised caro's 2006 book "zebra stripes" as "an exemplary study", and called it "one long argument", a phrase used by darwin of his "on the origin of species", summarizing it as "in essence a 300-page scientific paper". karin brulliard, writing in "the 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. matthew cobb, writing in "new scientist", recalls rudyard 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 calls "zebra 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."