In the opening scene of The Lion King, animals of every stripe, spot and tusk march in unison across the African plains, bound by an unseen thread of connection.
This iconic moment mirrors a natural phenomenon in the wild: zebras forging unlikely alliances with giraffes and traveling as a unified herd.
This real-life stripes-meets-spots pairing appears to serve a vital strategic purpose. Zebras and giraffes form a symbiotic bond that boosts both species’ chances of survival in a landscape teeming with lions and other threats, researchers report in a study in press for the April issue of American Naturalist. By attaching video cameras to zebras, the team documented for the first time how the two different species often move together over extended periods — a mixed-species union that likely helps to minimize predation and maximize feeding opportunities.
“This is an amazing use of novel technology to answer questions about animal decision-making,” says Melissa Schmitt, a large mammal ecologist at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks who was not involved in the research. “We’re getting very detailed insights from the perspective of the zebra that we’ve never really had before.”
The study focused on the movement and feeding patterns of six plains zebras (Equus quagga) — each in a different social group — as they roamed the hilly savannas and bushy grasslands of Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park, a 130-year-old nature preserve located a few hours’ drive from Durban, South Africa.
A trio of ecologists — Romain Dejeante, Marion Valeix and Simon Chamaillé-Jammes — at the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology in Montpellier, France, sifted through hours of video footage captured intermittently over several weeks. They found that zebras spent around a quarter of their daytime hours in the company of other species. Primarily the equines mingled with impalas, the most abundant large mammal in the park, but the zebras also gathered alongside buffalo, wildebeest and giraffes.
Not all mixed-species interactions were equal, though. The zebras spent roughly twice as much time per interaction with giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis) as with other animals — an average of 2.2 hours compared with about one hour with impalas and other ungulates. More notably, only with giraffes did zebras synchronize their movements and feeding patterns on the go, often grazing while traveling alongside their long-necked companions.
The alliance appears to benefit both species, notes Dejeante, who is now at the University of Guelph in Canada. Giraffes, with their towering height and sharp vision, serve as vigilant sentinels, providing early warning of approaching predators. Zebras offer safety in numbers, creating a bustling herd that deters potential attacks and reduces the chances of any one individual being targeted.
To Chamaillé-Jammes, the findings underscore the complexity of mixed-species relationships. “An ecosystem is not just a pile of independent species. It’s really a world of interactions,” he says.
This insight holds valuable lessons for conservation and wildlife management, notes T. Michael Anderson, a savanna ecologist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., who was not involved in the research. “These ecosystems evolved as multispecies assemblages,” he says — and so protecting them requires preserving the natural relationships that sustain the ecosystems.
It’s a Disney trope confirmed by ecology: No one thrives alone in the Circle of Life.