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Hyenas said to join wolf packs in unusual alliance

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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