49 Fun Facts About Hyena

What gives a hyena its distinctive sloping back?

Front legs longer than its hind legs: the high shoulders carry a powerful neck, built for tearing a carcass apart and carrying off the pieces.

Hyenas are more closely related to which animals, despite looking dog-like?

Cats and civets: hyenas sit on the cat side of the carnivore family tree, and only came to look like dogs because they too run prey down and catch it with their teeth.

Spotted hyena cubs are born what colour, only gaining their spots at two to three months?

Almost black: the dark birth coat lightens into the spotted adult pattern over the first months, and the spots then fade again as the animal ages.

Roughly how many termites can an aardwolf, the insect-eating hyena, lick up in a single night?

300,000: it licks them up with a long, sticky tongue and never wrecks the mound or eats the whole colony, so the termites rebuild and it can come back for more.

The aardwolf, a small termite-eating hyena, takes its name from Afrikaans words meaning what?

Earth-wolf, from aarde and wolf: it sleeps the day away in burrows underground and only comes out at night to feed.

In spotted hyena society, which sex is larger and dominant?

Females: rank passes from mother to cub, so the daughter of a top female outranks adults below her mother.

What is unusual about the female spotted hyena's anatomy?

Her genitals closely resemble a male's: she urinates, mates and gives birth through a 'pseudo-penis', which is why the ancients took hyenas for hermaphrodites.

Spotted hyenas, which kill most of what they eat, usually bring down wildebeest and zebra how?

After a long chase: they run through a herd to pick out one animal, then wear it down over several kilometres, relying on stamina rather than surprise.

A spotted hyena community is called what?

A clan: its members share one territory and one den, yet they spend most of their time apart in small shifting groups, so the whole clan is rarely seen together.

Scientists say spotted hyena society is unlike any other carnivore's and most resembles that of which animals?

Baboons and macaques: like those monkeys, spotted hyenas live in big ranked groups and keep track of who outranks whom among relatives and unrelated group-mates alike.

How are spotted hyena cubs unusual at birth among carnivorous mammals?

Born with eyes open and teeth erupted: after that head start they are slow to grow up, nursing for over a year on some of the richest milk of any land carnivore.

What do newborn spotted hyena twins often do soon after birth?

Attack each other: the fights are fiercest between twins of the same sex, and can end with the weaker cub dead.

Which hormones do high-ranking spotted hyena mothers pass to unborn cubs, making them more aggressive?

Male sex hormones: late in pregnancy a dominant mother's androgen levels run higher than a subordinate's, and her cubs of both sexes grow up pushier for it.

In a cooperative rope-pulling test, spotted hyenas outperformed which animals?

Chimpanzees: captive hyena pairs worked out how to tug two ropes in unison with no training at all, a trick that chimps often need long coaching to learn.

When threatened, an aardwolf makes itself look far bigger than it is by doing what?

Raising a mane along its back: the bristling crest gave the animal both its Afrikaans nickname, 'mane-jackal', and its scientific name, cristata, 'crested'.

Serengeti spotted hyenas were found carrying which usually deadly virus for years with no sign of illness?

Rabies: hyenas followed for up to 13 years carried the virus in their saliva on and off, yet none fell ill and they lived as long as the rest.

Hyenas are icons of Africa today, but the family first arose on which landmass?

Eurasia: its earliest hyenas were small omnivores, and the heavy bone-crushers came millions of years later.

Chasmaporthetes, the only hyena to reach North America, was built like which cat?

Cheetah: this 'running hyena' crossed the Bering land bridge and hunted by speed, perhaps because bone-crushing dogs already held the scavenger's place in America.

The giant hyena Pachycrocuta may have dragged which early humans into its cave?

Peking Man: the Zhoukoudian cave near Beijing was a hyena lair for millennia, so the fossils once read as a human home may be the leftovers of the hyenas' meals.

How do hyenas mark the borders of their territories?

By pasting anal-gland secretions on grass: bacteria living in the gland are thought to give each group's paste a smell of its own.

What do striped and brown hyenas often do when attacked by larger predators or dogs?

Feign death: a striped hyena can lie limp for a long time, even while it is being bitten, whereas the spotted hyena fights back ferociously.

The brown hyena's Afrikaans nickname, strandwolf, comes from its habit of scavenging where?

Along the seashore: 'strand' means beach, and on Namibia's desert coast brown hyenas patrol the tideline for washed-up carcasses and stray fur seal pups.

The IUCN's 2015 Red List placed the spotted hyena in which category?

Least Concern: with an estimated 27,000 to 47,000 animals it is Africa's most numerous large predator, though it is declining outside protected areas.

Outside Africa, the striped hyena's range runs through the Middle East and Central Asia as far east as where?

India: the striped hyena is the only hyena living outside Africa today, which is why it is the hyena of the Bible and of Middle Eastern folklore.

Across the Middle East, the striped hyena has long been reviled as a robber of what?

Graves: it will dig up buried bodies, which is why stones were traditionally piled on fresh graves in Turkey, and the charge has seen it hunted out of whole regions.

Pound for pound, which animal out-bites the spotted hyena and every other living carnivore tested?

The Tasmanian devil: for its size the hyena's bite turned out to be nothing special, so cracking bones evidently does not take extreme jaw-muscle force.

A spotted hyena's long-distance contact call, which can carry for several kilometres, is known as what?

The whoop: it keeps scattered group-mates in touch across the dark, whereas the famous giggle is a close-range sound of fear or excitement, often from an animal being chased.

What does the pitch of a spotted hyena's laugh indicate?

How old it is: the pitch of a giggle gives away the caller's age, and how much the notes vary tells listeners whether it is a dominant or a subordinate animal.

Which African people traditionally left their dead out for spotted hyenas rather than bury them?

The Maasai: they have little love for an animal that raids their livestock, yet by tradition they relied on it as their undertaker.

In Tanzania, witches are traditionally believed to use spotted hyenas as what?

Mounts: witches are said to ride them by night, and in the Mtwara Region a child born while a hyena is crying is expected to grow up a thief.

In Ethiopian folklore, the bouda, often said to be blacksmiths, can supposedly do what?

Transform into hyenas: the power was said to run in families of blacksmiths, a hereditary trade, which left smiths eyed with suspicion by their neighbours.

In which Ethiopian city do inhabitants regularly feed spotted hyenas, believing they keep devils away?

Harar: its 'hyena men' feed the animals by hand outside the old city walls, a custom that since the 1960s has turned into a nightly show for visitors.

In the Near and Middle East, striped hyenas are traditionally regarded as incarnations of what?

Jinns: the medieval scholar al-Damiri wrote that a hyena finding a man asleep would dig under his head, seize him by the throat and drink his blood.

Pliny the Elder claimed that hyenas lured shepherds to their deaths by doing what?

Calling them by name: Pliny wrote that a hyena lurks by the sheepfolds, learns a shepherd's name by listening, then imitates a human voice to draw him out.

In Hebrew, hyena is spelled the same as a word, literally 'painted', for which kind of person?

Hypocrite: that sense comes from an adjective meaning 'painted' or 'coloured', while the animal's name may be a separate, older Semitic word that is only spelled the same.

Which ancient Greek philosopher wrote that the hyena lures dogs by imitating a man retching?

Aristotle: the tale is in his History of Animals, and Pliny the Elder was still repeating it four centuries later.

In which Shakespeare comedy does Rosalind compare her laughter to that of a 'hyen'?

As You Like It: disguised as a boy, Rosalind warns Orlando that as a wife she will weep when he is merry and laugh like a hyena just when he wants to sleep.

Inside fossilised hyena dung some 200,000 years old, scientists in South Africa found what probable human remains?

Hairs: if they are human, as their structure suggests, they beat the previous oldest known human hair, from a 9,000-year-old mummy in Chile, by about 200,000 years.

In 1821 William Buckland showed that hyenas had once dragged the bones of which animals into a Yorkshire cave?

Hippos and elephants: Buckland proved the gnawed bones were the leftovers of a hyena den, not creatures swept in by Noah's Flood, and won the Copley Medal for it.

Which US president recorded that hyenas in Uganda regularly killed sleeping-sickness sufferers?

Theodore Roosevelt: he reported it in African Game Trails, his account of the year-long safari he sailed for in March 1909, less than three weeks after leaving the White House.

The biologist whose Berkeley hyena colony Disney's animators sketched for The Lion King later urged people to do what?

Boycott the film: he listed it, half in jest, among the ways to help hyenas in the wild, and later joked that The Lion King had set their conservation back.

Who voiced Shenzi, leader of the hyena trio in the 1994 Lion King?

Whoopi Goldberg: the hyenas were written for the comedy duo Cheech and Chong, but Tommy Chong was unavailable, so his part was rewritten as a female and she claimed it.

Which of The Lion King's hyenas never speaks a word, answering only in bursts of manic laughter?

Ed: his laughs came from the voice actor Jim Cummings, who also sang part of the villain's song 'Be Prepared' in place of Jeremy Irons.

In which safari memoir does Ernest Hemingway mock the hyena as a 'self-eating devourer of the dead'?

Green Hills of Africa: his gun-bearer M'Cola laughs and shakes his head whenever 'Fisi' appears, and Hemingway adds 'sad yowler, camp-follower, stinking, foul' for good measure.

The oldest known pictures of spotted hyenas were painted on Ice Age cave walls in which modern country?

France: a spotted hyena is painted in red and black at Lascaux and another appears at Chauvet, because the living animal shared the artists' valleys until the Ice Age ended.

The word 'hyena' comes from the ancient Greek word for which farm animal?

Pig: Greek hyaina is a feminine form of hys, 'swine', a name apparently given to the animal because of its hog-like bristles.

William Buckland, who recognised fossil hyena droppings in an English cave, later coined which word for fossilised dung?

Coprolite, Greek for 'dung stone': Buckland had a menagerie keeper confirm that the white lumps in the cave matched a living hyena's droppings.

How do hyenas of every species differ from dogs in feeding their young?

They never regurgitate food for them: with no meat carried home in the stomach, a spotted hyena mother has to keep her cubs on milk for more than a year.

Spotted hyenas rarely dig a den from scratch, usually enlarging burrows abandoned by which animals?

Aardvarks and warthogs: cubs are born in a private burrow, then moved at a few weeks old to a shared 'kindergarten' den where each mother still nurses only her own.