Gnawing at striping – how rodents evolve striped patterns

Abstract

Pigment patterns throughout the animal kingdom repeatedly utilise shared motifs (solid spots, hollow spots, stripes in different orientations), begging the question of whether these are generated by the same or different mechanisms in each case. Although intuitively this might seem unlikely, a whole body of work on mathematical modelling of these patterns suggests that, in theory at least, all such patterns could share an underlying mechanism. Within the mammals, one such motif is alternating longitudinal dark and light stripes, whether the supremely contrasting facial stripes of European Meles meles and American Badgers Taxidea taxus or the more subtle and more numerous stripes of the head, flanks and back of chipmunks, Tamias. Work from the laboratories of Hopi Hoekstra and Greg Barsh recently published in Nature contributes substantially to the current understanding by examining two striped species of mammals, including the Eastern Chipmunk, T. striatus

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