biting flies have an aversion to landing on striped surfaces.
Biting flies can't evolve?
I found the whole thing very unconvincing.
Agreed. I find it a little difficult to believe that biting flies couldn't evolve past this stripe defense. There are thousands, maybe millions, of generations of flies in one just one zebra lifespan, so flies clearly have the evolutionary advantage. Granted I don't know tsetse fly biology well, but I know many other biting flies can detect body heat and carbon dioxide from animals, which would reduce effectiveness of the stripe defense significantly, assuming the flies don't rely on vision alone to find prey/hosts. Furthermore, if zebras can evolve bug repellant stripes, why haven't other animals living in the same areas done the same? I don't think the bugs are that picky about which species they bite.
Have there been any studies to correlate populations of predators to striped zebras to put to rest the old claim that stripes help the zebras blend together as a herd to confuse predators, which rely 100% on sight to make a kill? That still seems like a more plausible explanation to me, and any bug repellant properties of stripes just be a welcome side-effect.