OPUS: CRS - The evolutionary ecology of the spotted hyena

Michigan State University, East Lansing MI

Investigators

Abstract

The proposed will synthesize research on the ecology and social behavior of wild spotted hyenas. Its products will include a publicly accessible database and a book that should appeal broadly to college students and to lay people, teaching them about animal behavior in general, and carnivore behavior in particular. The book will focus on a continuous long-term study of spotted hyenas in Kenya that was started in early 1988. It will explain what these bizarre animals have taught us about a number of different topics, including how they manage to bring down prey three times their own size without help from other hunters, how they rear their daughters to dominate their sons, how they can eat large doses of anthrax bacteria without feeling ill, and how they manage to usurp food from lions. This project will leverage long term data following the behavior of individual hyenas over their lifetime and their reproductive success to understand these phenomena. Finally, the researcher will continue to collaborate with several media outlets including National Geographic Television - that have recently documented her research with spotted hyenas. This research will provide insights into the unique combination of features leading to the evolution of one of the world’s strangest mammals; the products will be of broad interest to behavioral ecologists, wildlife managers, and conservation biologists. This project will entail a synthesis of over three decades of research on the evolutionary ecology of what is arguably the more puzzling of all mammals. Spotted hyenas puzzle us with their morphology, their behavior, their physiology, their cognitive abilities, their social lives, and their evolutionary origins. Products of this synthesis will include both a book and a clean database ready to hand over to a new generation of biologists hoping to continue field study of spotted hyenas in Kenya into the future. The book will address questions about spotted hyenas at all four of Niko Tinbergen’s analytical levels, weaving together all that we have discovered in regard to their ontogeny, their physiology, and the adaptive significance of their behavioral, intellectual and morphological traits in light of their phylogenetic history. The book will also focus on spotted hyenas as ‘brain-teasers' in each of these topical areas. The database documents behavior, physiology, development, rank and genealogical relationships with data collected daily since early 1988 from up to seven generations of hyenas belonging to six study clans in the Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya. This work is being funded jointly by the Behavioral Systems Cluster in the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems and the Evolutionary Processes Cluster in the Division of Environmental Biology. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.