Animal · Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana
Zebra
Equus quagga — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The zebra is a wild relative of the horse, instantly recognisable by its bold black-and-white stripes. Large herds roam the grassy plains of East and southern Africa together with wildebeest.
Picture credit: Bernard DUPONT (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Bernard DUPONT (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Bernard DUPONT (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the zebra live?
Home: Grassy plains and savannas of eastern and southern Africa.
In the wild you find it in: Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique.
Conservation status from the IUCN: close to being at risk.
The short profile
Fully grown it measures up to 2.4 m long. It weighs about 300 kilograms. On the menu: plants.
The story behind it
No two zebras have exactly the same stripe pattern, and scientists still study why the stripes exist at all; leading ideas include confusing biting flies, breaking up their outline to predators, and helping herd members recognise each other. Zebras live in family groups and can run up to 65 km/h to escape lions, zig-zagging to make themselves harder to catch. Every year, huge herds of plains zebra join wildebeest on a long migration across the Serengeti and Maasai Mara in search of fresh grass and water. Hunting and competition with livestock for grazing land have made zebra numbers slowly decline.
Find it on the globe
Zebra is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why do zebras have stripes?
Scientists believe zebra stripes help confuse biting flies, make it harder for predators to pick out one animal from a moving herd, and help zebras recognise each other. No single answer is fully proven yet.
Are zebras black with white stripes or white with black stripes?
A zebra's skin underneath is actually black, but most scientists say the base coat colour is white with black stripes added on top, since white patches appear first as the pattern develops before birth.
How fast can a zebra run?
A zebra can run up to about 65 km/h, almost as fast as a lion's top speed, and often escapes by running in a zig-zag pattern that makes it harder to catch. Foals can run within hours of being born.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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