A recent report indicates that researchers have discovered a pack of wolves hunting alongside a hyena, an occurrence never before documented.
Researchers from India in the Middle East have reported an extremely unusual behavior: they have observed a pack of wolves hunting prey together with a hyena, a phenomenon that has never been reported before.
Typically, different carnivorous species do not coexist harmoniously. Most of the time, they compete for and steal each other’s prey. Occasionally, these animals may fight and even kill one another over food. However, somehow, this unusual peaceful coexistence is actually occurring.
The striped hyena originates from North Africa, India, and the Middle East. When threatened, they can raise their fur along their backs, making them appear about 30% larger!
Wolves are highly social animals, but they almost never accept outsiders into their packs – even dogs, which share many similarities with wolves, are often chased away or hunted rather than welcomed.
In contrast, striped hyenas living in the Middle East are quite the opposite, as they often live solitary lives. Therefore, when researchers found tracks of the hyena mixed with those of gray wolves, they sensed that something unusual was happening.
Vladimir Dinets, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, stated: “Wild animal behavior is often more flexible than what is described in textbooks. When necessary, wild animals can abandon their usual strategies and learn something entirely new, surprising us in the process. This is also a very useful skill for survival.”
The hyena can be described as an animal with a “dog-like” body and “cat-like” anatomy, but it is truly a unique creature.
The scientists tracked their movements multiple times, including a layer of moist sand that showed the tracks of both hyenas and wolves. Initially, they thought the hyena was chasing the wolf pack (or vice versa), but that was not the case.
In some places, the tracks of one of the three wolves were found on the hyena’s tracks. In other areas, the hyena’s shape was found on the wolf’s footprints.
Ultimately, after four years, they discovered that this wolf pack was actually with the hyena. Beniamin Eligulashvili, a zoologist in Israel, witnessed this phenomenon firsthand and recounted that the hyena was indeed moving with the wolf pack as a member of the group.
Hyenas belong to a distinct family within the Carnivora order, which includes four existing species. The spotted hyena, brown hyena, and aardwolf all originate from Sub-Saharan Africa. The striped hyena is native to North Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent.
“The hyena did not follow the wolf pack; instead, it moved among them,” the study by both authors noted.
This could benefit both animal species. The Negev Desert is one of the harshest environments in the range of both species, and both need all the help they can get.
Wolves are generally better hunters than striped hyenas (especially when hunting in packs). They are also faster and more agile. However, striped hyenas have a more acute sense of smell and a stronger bite – capable of breaking larger bones and tearing apart the skulls of their prey.
In the desert, food is scarce, and they must employ every means possible to ensure a higher success rate in hunting compared to other areas. But how these two species managed to reach a “peace agreement” and how they tolerate each other still requires much more research for a clear explanation.
The striped hyena is slightly smaller than the spotted and brown hyenas and is the least studied. They have a broad head with black eyes, a thick muzzle, and large, pointed ears. Their muzzle, ears, and throat are entirely black, while their fur can be yellowish, brown, or gray with black stripes on their body and legs. A long mane of fur grows along their back. Hyenas camouflage well in dry, tall grass. The most distinctive feature of the hyena is its legs: the front legs are much longer than the hind legs. This gives the hyena a unique gait, making them appear as if they are always limping uphill.
However, current research has also revealed that there is significant overlap in the territories of these two species in certain areas, but this unusual cooperation has not been reported anywhere else.
There are three main hypotheses for this unusual behavior:
- First, this is an “unusual” behavior and a unique occurrence of a single hyena. Although two observations were made four years apart, it could be the same hyena.
- Second, the striped hyena may be scavenging leftovers from the wolf’s prey, following them to eat the bones and scraps of meat left behind. However, this does not explain why the wolves would tolerate a hyena in the middle of their pack.
- Third, the hyena and wolves may have formed a symbiotic relationship. Such symbiotic relationships have been known to exist among other species in nature.
Currently, more observations are needed to draw clearer conclusions and determine what makes this type of interaction special or if it has occurred elsewhere. Dinets argues that cooperative hunting between predator species is extremely rare, but perhaps not as uncommon as we might think. Nature seems to always find ways to surprise us.
