Spotted Hyena

The spotted hyena is the animal most people picture when they hear the word hyena, and it is the one behind the name laughing hyena, which comes from the high giggling call it makes around food and during tense moments with other clan members. Its scientific name is Crocuta crocuta, and it is the only living member of its genus. Although hyenas look a lot like dogs, they belong to a separate family, the Hyaenidae, which sits on the cat side of the carnivore family tree, closer to mongooses, civets and cats than to wolves or jackals. The spotted hyena is the largest of the four living hyenas and by far the most social. Thousands of years ago spotted hyenas also lived across Europe and Asia, where they used caves as dens, but they disappeared from Europe between about 14,000 and 11,000 years ago. Today the species lives only in Africa south of the Sahara, where it is the most common large predator on many savannas.

There are four living species in the hyena family, and they are surprisingly different. The spotted hyena is the biggest, the most social and the best hunter. The striped hyena is smaller and much quieter, with long stripes on its body and a tall mane along its back. It lives alone or in small family groups across North and East Africa, the Middle East and as far as India, and it feeds mostly on carrion, small animals and fruit. The brown hyena has long, shaggy dark fur and lives in the dry southwest of Africa, including the Kalahari and the Namib coast, where it scavenges along beaches. The fourth member, the aardwolf, hardly looks like a hyena at all: it is small, has weak teeth and eats almost nothing but termites. Spotted, striped and brown hyenas share the strong jaws and teeth that crack bones, but only the spotted hyena regularly hunts large prey in groups, and where they live together it usually dominates the other two at carcasses.

Adults stand about 70 to 91 centimeters at the shoulder and measure roughly 95 to 165 centimeters from nose to the base of the tail, plus a short, bushy tail of 25 to 35 centimeters. Weight changes a lot from region to region. In the Serengeti, adult males weigh about 40 to 55 kilograms and females about 44 to 64 kilograms, while hyenas in Zambia are heavier, with averages close to 68 kilograms. The front legs are longer than the back legs, which gives the body its typical sloping shape, and the neck and shoulders are packed with muscle for carrying heavy pieces of meat. The coat is sandy, yellowish or gray with dark brown or black spots, and the spots tend to fade as the animal gets older. The head is broad with a black muzzle and round ears, unlike the pointed ears of the striped and brown hyenas. Cubs are born almost black and only develop their spotted coat at two to three months of age.

The laugh that gave the spotted hyena its nickname is not a sign of amusement. It is a fast, high pitched giggle that hyenas make when they are excited, frustrated or stressed, usually at a carcass when a dominant animal chases them away. A study of these calls found that the giggle carries information about the caller: its pitch hints at the hyena's age, and the variation in the notes reflects its social rank. The best known long distance call is the whoop, a series of rising calls that can be heard several kilometers away at night. Hyenas whoop to gather scattered clan members, to call for help in fights with lions or neighboring clans, and to let others know where they are, and each hyena has its own recognizable voice. Scent is just as important: spotted hyenas paste a strong smelling secretion from glands under the tail onto grass stalks, marking the borders of their territory and leaving messages for other clans.

Spotted hyenas live across most of sub Saharan Africa, from Senegal and Gambia in the west to Ethiopia and Somalia in the east and south to South Africa. They are very adaptable and use open savannas, grasslands, dry woodlands, semidesert scrub and mountains. They avoid the deep interior of rainforests and the driest deserts, although camera traps have shown clans living in the savanna patches of the Congo Basin, as in Odzala Kokoua National Park. Their range is most continuous in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana, Namibia and northeastern South Africa. Some of the largest populations are in the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania and in Kruger National Park in South Africa, where a 2015 count estimated about 7,000 to 7,700 animals. In West and Central Africa most hyenas survive in or near protected areas such as W, Pendjari, Comoé and Niokolo Koba. Clan territories range from about 30 to more than 1,000 square kilometers, depending on prey.

The old image of the hyena as a cowardly scavenger is mostly wrong for this species. In places like Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti, spotted hyenas kill the large majority of what they eat, and lions often steal their kills rather than the other way around. They hunt wildebeest, zebras, gazelles, topi, impala and other antelopes, usually picking out a young, old or weak animal and chasing it over long distances at up to about 60 kilometers per hour. A single hyena can kill a wildebeest calf, while groups take on adult zebras. They also scavenge whenever they find a carcass and steal from cheetahs, leopards and wild dogs. Their jaws are built for bones: in one study a spotted hyena bit a measuring device with a force of about 4,500 newtons. Their stomachs digest bone, hide and even hooves, and their droppings turn white from all the calcium. Near villages they also eat livestock and garbage, the main source of conflict with people.

Spotted hyenas have one of the most complex societies of any carnivore, closer in some ways to baboons than to lions. Clans usually have from a few to several dozen members, and in Ngorongoro Crater, where prey is abundant all year, researchers have followed clans of up to about 130 hyenas. Each clan defends a shared territory and is built around related females and their cubs, together with immigrant males. Every member has a place in a strict ranking, and rank decides who eats first at a kill. Cubs inherit their rank from their mother, who helps them win their first fights against lower ranking adults. The clan rarely moves as one group. Hyenas come and go in smaller parties that join and split up during the day, a pattern called fission and fusion, and they gather in large numbers to hunt big prey or to chase lions from a kill. The center of clan life is the communal den, where all the cubs live together, although each mother nurses only her own.

Telling a male spotted hyena from a female is famously hard. Females have an unusual anatomy: their external genitals look very much like those of the males, and they mate and give birth through this structure. The spotted hyena is the only placental mammal in which females have no external vaginal opening, which makes the first birth difficult and sometimes dangerous for young mothers. For centuries this confused naturalists, and some even believed hyenas could change sex. Females are also about 10 percent heavier than males on average and far more aggressive. In a clan, every adult female outranks every adult male, and even the cubs of a high ranking female can push grown males away from a kill. Males leave their birth clan at about two to three years of age and join a new one, where they start at the bottom. Because females choose their mates, males that are patient and friendly toward them tend to have more cubs than pushy ones.

Spotted hyenas usually avoid people, and attacks on humans are rare, but they do happen. Most cases involve hyenas that have grown used to living near villages and towns, during droughts or where wild prey has disappeared, and the victims are often children or people sleeping outside at night. In 2017, for example, hyenas attacked families and livestock in the Awdal region of Somaliland during a long drought. Far more common is the loss of goats, sheep, donkeys and calves, which leads many herders to kill hyenas with poison, traps or guns, and poisoned carcasses also kill vultures. Better night enclosures for livestock are one of the most effective ways to reduce the conflict. The relationship is not always hostile. In the Ethiopian city of Harar, hyenas have walked the old town streets at night for generations, and local men feed them by hand in a tradition linked to the belief that they keep evil spirits away.

The IUCN lists the spotted hyena as Least Concern because the species is still widespread, although counting a nocturnal animal across so much of Africa is very difficult. The overall trend is downward. Most stable populations are in protected areas of southern and East Africa, while numbers have fallen in much of West and Central Africa, and the species is considered possibly extinct in Algeria and Togo. The main threats are persecution by herders and farmers, poisoning, snares set for other animals, the loss of wild prey and the spread of farmland. Body parts are also used in traditional medicine in some countries. There is good news too: spotted hyenas have been brought back to places where they had vanished. In Mozambique, Gorongosa National Park, where hyenas disappeared in the 1980s, has received 15 since 2022, and the first cubs were born there in 2023. Four were also released in Zinave National Park, as part of the effort to restore its predators.