żyrafy-i-kopytne: Spotted hyena

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

The spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta), also known as the laughing hyena, is a hyena species, currently classed as the sole extant member of the genus Crocuta, native to sub-Saharan Africa. It is listed as being of least concern by the IUCN due to its widespread range and large numbers estimated between 27,000 and 47,000 individuals. The species is, however, experiencing declines outside of protected areas due to habitat loss and poaching. Populations of Crocuta, usually considered a subspecies of Crocuta crocuta, known as cave hyenas, roamed across Eurasia for at least one million years until the end of the Late Pleistocene. The spotted hyena is the largest extant member of the Hyaenidae, and…

Evidence: 52 • authority: 92

Fission-Fusion Group Dynamics and Cooperative Hunting Stabilise Social Carnivore Populations.. Theory suggests that large social groups of carnivores should be unsustainable, due to reduced foraging efficiency because of overlapping perception radii. Using Serengeti lions as a case study, we apply behaviourally based foraging models to show that fragmentation of social groups into smaller subgroups or mutual cooperation during hunting are both plausible hypothetical mechanisms capable of sustaining larger lion prides. Data from the Serengeti ecosystem demonstrate that lion prides typically fragment into small hunting groups that are well approximated by an exponential distribution of group…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 92

Convergent carnivores or divergent dasyurids? Inferring predation and locomotor strategies of extant and extinct carnivorous marsupials from locomotor shape.. Predation pressure shapes ecosystems via selection on locomotor form and function. To explore this link, we grouped 48 species of predatory mammals into five hunting-strategy clusters: Anteaters, Opportunistic Grapplers, Large Grapplers, Opportunistic Pouncers, and Social Hunters, and asked whether their locomotor shape (limb posture through the stride) reliably distinguished these clusters. We digitised 115 side-view stride sequences across these species, performed Procrustes alignment and principal component analysis on per-stride s…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 92

Long-Term Demography of Spotted Hyena (<i>Crocuta crocuta</i>) in a Lion-Depleted but Prey-Rich Ecosystem.. Interspecific competition has strongly shaped the evolution of large carnivore guilds. In Africa, the lion ( Panthera leo ) and spotted hyena ( Crocuta crocuta, hereafter hyena ) exert direct and indirect competitive impacts on each other and on subordinate guild members. The impacts of competition on demography are complex and not well understood. With carnivore guilds now ubiquitously impacted by humans, disentangling the effects of interspecific competition and other drivers of hyena demography is important. Western Zambia's Greater Liuwa Ecosystem (GLE) provides a uniq…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 92

The legacy of privilege: Social inheritance reverses sex differences in reproductive inequality in the spotted hyena.. Inequalities in reproductive success among females and males shape natural and sexual selection. For sexually reproducing species, the Darwin-Bateman paradigm predicts greater reproductive inequality in males than females. A mechanism driving reproductive inequality in humans and other animals is social inheritance of privilege. Here, we show that this mechanism can reverse the male bias in reproductive inequality. Using a 29-year dataset spanning eight generations of spotted hyenas ( Crocuta crocuta ), a species in which social rank and privileges are inherited from the mo…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

The African wild dog (Lycaon pictus), also called painted dog and Cape hunting dog, is a wild canine native to sub-Saharan Africa. It is the largest wild canine in Africa and the only extant member of the genus Lycaon, which is distinguished from Canis by dentition highly specialised for a hypercarnivorous diet and by a lack of dewclaws. An estimated 6,600 adults (including 1,400 mature individuals) live in 39 subpopulations, all threatened by habitat fragmentation, human persecution, and outbreaks of disease. As the largest subpopulation probably consists of fewer than 250 individuals, the African wild dog has been listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List since 1990. The African wild dog…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 80

Evidence: 45 • authority: 80

Social intelligence and the brain in the spotted hyena

Evidence: 43 • authority: 92