text: why are tigers *orange* and black if they live in green jungles? shouldn't they be green and black? same reason that battle fatigues are in a variety of colors including browns - the striping is there to break up an outline, which it does admirably. also, pattern recognition in many animals is for a specific form of predator/prey which gets obscured by the stripe pattern against a background. color is actually of little interests since many animals don't see color.