Zebra Camouflaged Annual Reports

To humans, a zebra's stripes stick out like a sore thumb, so it's hard to imagine that the stripes act as camouflage. Zoologists believe stripes offer zebras protection from predators in a couple of different ways.

The first is as simple pattern-camouflage, much like the type the military uses in its fatigue design­. The wavy lines of a zebra blend in with the wavy lines of the tall grass around it. It doesn't matter that the zebra's stripes are black and white and the lines of the grass are yellow, brown or green, because the zebra's main predator, the lion, is colorblind. The pattern of the camouflage is much more important than its color, when hiding from these predators. If a zebra is standing still in matching surroundings, a lion may overlook it completely.

This benefit may help an individual zebra in some situations, but the more significant means of protection has to do with zebra herds. Zebras usually travel in large groups, in which they stay very close to one another. Even with their camouflage pattern, it's highly unlikely a large gathering of zebras would be able to escape a lion's notice, but their stripes help them use this large size to their advantage. When all the zebras keep together as a big group, the patte­rn of each zebra's stripes blends in with the stripes of the zebras around it. This is confusing to the lion, who sees a large, moving, striped mass instead of many individual zebras.


Having said all that. How boring can annual reports and confidential documents be? I thought about camouflaging annual reports and confidential documentation much like a zebra. Using a black and white print of a zebra pattern and splitting the information between two transparencies. The documentation looks very confusing and doesn't make much sense until you lay the transparencies over the top of the zebra pattern.

Above is the plain zebra pattern.

Above you can see the transparencies with the writing.

Above is the completed document and it is now legible.