This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkins. Got a minute.

They say that wearing stripes can make you look thinner.

Well, lizards don't care about looking felt. But their stripes might help them avoid getting caught by a hungry predator, and not by camouflage. No, it may be that the stripes make them look like they're moving slower than they really are, messing up the

predator's timing. That's according to a report in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

Gopal Muralee at the Indian Institute of Science Education Research got interested in the question of why so many lizard sports stripes while perusing hundreds of images of the conspicuously decorated critters.

Surfacingly, when we looked into the literature, we did not find any direct experimental evidence for the role of striped coloration in lizards.

Seems such eye-catching coloration would make the bearers easier for predators to spot in the wild.

So Morale wondered whether bright stripes might create a sort of optical illusion,

one that would disorient predators and maybe get them to grab a lizard's tail rather than a more vital body part.

Since it is well known that the tail of lizard can be easily lost and most of the predators

are known to attack the head or body of the lizards, we thought that the presence of contrasting stripes on the body of

lizards in motion might actually trick predators to attack the tail, which doesn't

cause much for the lizards when its life is at risk.

But does such strippy subterfuge really work that way? To test the idea,

Muralee could not change the colors of actual animals, to see whether racing

stripes can really save a lizard's hide more so than solid colors or random blotches.

And he knew he couldn't convince live predators to try to capture fake lizard models.

So he did the next best thing.

We can adopt the experiment using humans as a rugged predators and ask them to play a game on a

touch screen where they attacked the virtual lizards with different color patterns.

Morale had more than 150 volunteers lunge for rectangular prey on a touch screen.

He suggested that they aim for the head, the region at the front of the rectangle based on which way it was moving.

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