Courtesy of University of Tennessee at Knoxville
and World Science staff
Animals of different species sometimes lean on each other in times of adversity—just as humans do, according to a new study.
Vladimir Dinets of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, working with Israel-based zoologist Beniamin Eligulashvili, examined an unlikely friendship between striped hyenas and grey wolves in the southern Negev desert, Israel.
Dinets suspects the extreme desert’s particularly inhospitable conditions—and a need for food—might have pushed the two enemies into an unusual alliance.
“Animal behavior is often more flexible than described in textbooks,” Dinets said. “When necessary, animals can abandon their usual strategies and learn something completely new and unexpected. It’s a very useful skill for people, too.”
The study appears in the journal Zoology in the Middle East.
Hyenas and wolves are generally not friendly toward other carnivores. Hyenas fight epic battles with lions and African wild dogs, and take over kills that leopards and cheetahs have made. They easily kill domestic dogs, no matter the size, in one-on-one fights. Wolves hunt and kill lynxes, coyotes and even dogs, their closest relatives.
So Dinets and Eligulashvili were surprised when they saw striped hyenas—little known, mostly solitary relatives of the better-known spotted hyenas of Africa—in the middle of grey wolf packs, moving together through a maze of canyons in the southern part of the Negev desert.
The researchers initially inferred this behavior from animal tracks. The second time, four years later, they saw it directly in the same area. They don’t know if the same animals were involved in both cases, or whether the behavior was an aberration or a regular occurrence.
Dinets theorizes that both predators tolerated each other because they benefit from roaming the desert together. Wolves are more agile and can chase and take down all large animals of the region, while hyenas have an acute sense of smell and can locate carrion from many miles away. Hyenas also are better at digging out buried garbage and cracking open large bones and tin cans.
Both the grey wolf (Canis lupus) and the striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena) are found in many geographic areas and overlap in many parts of Asia. But the southern Negev is the most arid place where both species are known to occur.
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