Survival Trait?

So, you may remember having been told that zebras evolved their striped pattern as a way of visually confusing lions, thus allowing them to either hide or get a head start and avoid the evolutionary dead end of being eaten and turned into lion dung.

Apparently, according to a study in Nature Communications, the stripes are more likely to be a method for avoiding being bitten by flies, which do not land on striped surfaces. Researchers correlated information from several studies that showed the most likely evolutionary benefit of the stripe pattern is avoiding flies. Both zebras and other striped or partially-striped animals existing today and in the past have been Leo's lunch with enough regularity to suggest that he's got no problem picking them out of a crowd of savannah grass.

Which kind of makes you wonder just how smart Mother Nature is, if she's given the zebra a way to avoid being bitten by an insect that it outweighs some seventy-five thousand times instead of one to avoid being bitten by a feline predator as large or even larger than itself.