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Why do rabbits have white tails?

Black Swan · 2016-07-02 14:02:17

What is the evolutionary advantage for dark brown fur rabbits to have white fluffy tails? Dirk Semmann of University of Goettingen suggests that it's not for reasons of sexual selection, or an alert signal to its species that a predator is near, rather as a defense mechanism to distract and confuse predators during the…

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02-07-2016 3:02pm

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Black Swan

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What is the evolutionary advantage for dark brown fur rabbits to have white fluffy tails? Dirk Semmann of University of Goettingen suggests that it's not for reasons of sexual selection, or an alert signal to its species that a predator is near, rather as a defense mechanism to distract and confuse predators during the chase.

To test his theory, Semmann created a simple video gaming simulation with humans virtually chasing rabbits and predicting rabbit directions, with white tailed target rabbits for the experimental group, and non-tailed rabbits as controls. Semmann reported that he found a significant difference between groups, with the white tailed rabbits producing more errors by humans virtually chasing them than for those without tails.

While what Semmann suggests may have merit, does this at the same time exclude the possibility that the white tail may also serve other evolutionary and multiple purposes (e.g., sexual selection, predator alert, etc.)?

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