Speaking of hyenas, many people sneer at them, there is no good impression of them, but I dare to say that most people have not seen the real hyenas, and their understanding of them is mostly obtained from other people's texts, or film and television materials, since it is "knowledge" heard from elsewhere, it is inevitable that it will carry the author's subjective emotions, which are easily affected by the author's personal cognition, and even some people can't even distinguish between spotted hyenas, brown hyenas, and hyenas, and dare to boast about them, so that gradually people's misunderstanding of hyenas is getting deeper and deeper.
Spotted hyena
People often say that the hyena generally refers to the spotted hyena, belongs to the hyena family, the hyena family has a total of 4 kinds of animals, namely the spotted hyena, brown hyena, hyena and coyote, and the spotted hyena is the largest in the hyena family, but also the strongest existence, because of its super social attributes, coupled with good strength, has become the only "legion" in the African savannah that can be compared with lions.
Because the spotted hyena is unpleasant, the bark is crazy, and the way of hunting is cruel, people have not had a good impression of it, and some pejorative descriptions or words naturally appear on the spotted hyena.
4 species of hyenas
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > spotted hyenas are neither canines nor cats</h1>
Earlier, people looked at the name and thought that the spotted hyena was a canine, after all, from the appearance and lifestyle, it is very similar to the dog, but if you look at some details, you can still see a lot of differences.
Morphologically, most canines such as gray wolves, the posture is more symmetrical, looking more pleasing to the eye, while the spotted hyena shoulders are high and low, the forelimbs are strong, and the hind limbs are relatively less developed, such a body structure is doomed to the spotted hyena can not have the same speed as gray wolves and leopards, it runs up and down, like a moving seesaw, very funny.
However, because the spotted hyena has a large heart, accounting for 1% of its body weight, coupled with its short and blunt paws, the claw pad is wide and thick for long-term walking, so the spotted hyena has a strong endurance and can track its prey for a long time.
In addition, the spotted hyena has the most powerful skull in the carnivorous order, and the premolar teeth are conical, which is easy to break the bones of animals, so the spotted hyena has become the existence of "eating meat without spitting bones".
In the grassland, the wreckage left after the lions eat can make many "scavengers" eat a full meal or even several meals again, and the scene after the spotted hyena eats, there is almost no food residue left. Due to the special head structure of the spotted hyena, even if it tries its best to bite the bone, the reaction force will not affect its skull, which is one of the reasons why the spotted hyena can bite so high.
Spotted hyena feeding scene
From the perspective of external morphology and skull and tooth structure, there is a big gap between spotted hyenas and canines, in fact, although the name of the spotted hyena has the word "dog", it really has nothing to do with canines, and even a village (general family) is not counted, at most it is a country (carnivorous).
Spotted hyenas belong to the hyena family, compared to the large family of canines, the hyena family can be described as "human withering", with only 4 species. In recent years, due to the popular science of many authors, the spotted hyena has been separated from the canine family, but it has brought another rumor, that is, people have begun to say that the spotted hyena is a feline.
Why do people say that spotted hyenas are felines? This starts with carnivorous orders, there are two suborders under the carnivorous order, canine suborder and cat suborder, seal family, sea lion family, walrus family, skunk family, ferret family, red panda family, raccoon family, bear family, canine family are divided under the canine suborder, and the cat type suborder contains the badger family, civet cat family, double spotted tanuki family, anteater family, cat family and hyena family.
Later, according to the latest classification, the suborder canine and cat-type suborders were relegated to the general family of canines and cats, while the cat family and hyena family were still classified as under the general family of cats, so there was a saying that "hyenas belong to the feline family".
But in fact, the cat type family and the cat family are two completely different concepts, they are the relationship between inclusion and inclusion, in addition to the cat family and the hyena family, there are also the badger family, the civet family, in fact, in the cat type family, the closest relationship with the hyena family is not a cat, but a badger family, so the spotted hyena is not a canine, nor a cat, it can only be said that compared to the canine family, the relationship between the spotted hyena and the cat family is a little closer.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > spotted hyenas love to be clean? </h1>
Spotted hyena dirty, sloppy, is many people's intuitive impression of it, people feel that it scavenging, take the way to hunt, nature and do not love clean can not be related, but clean is just a word derived from the human world, or a phenomenon of behavioral constraints.
Just as the so-called "my honey and arsenic", take the feces of this thing, people think that it is excrement, unhygienic, lest avoid it, but for dogs, it is a rare food, so we take this set of human beings to measure the behavior norms of wild animals, nature is not so scientific.
dog
But even so, spotted hyenas can not be said not to love clean, take the "feces" aspect, if you can take the initiative to stay away from their nests, to a fixed place to defecate, is regarded as "hygiene", "love clean", then the spotted hyena is undoubtedly doing a good job in this regard, because according to a recent study found that in order to ensure the cleanliness of the nest near the nest, the group will establish a "public toilet" not far from the nest, and the members of the group will basically go to the "public toilet" for defecation. This behavior is a must for many wild animals.
Fossilized hyena feces
People have found a large number of fossils of spotted hyena feces on two ancient Spanish human sites, the number of which has exceeded the number of random excretion in the wild, obviously this is a "pit", and these fecal fossils are of different shapes and sizes, after expert identification, it was found that hyenas from different individuals and different ages show that the behavior of defecating in a fixed place is not the behavior of a single spotted hyena, but the behavior of the entire hyena group, so from this aspect, Can it also be said that spotted hyenas do not like to be clean?
In fact, the reason why spotted hyenas appear this specific behavior is mainly to keep the nest near the clean, if the nest is filled with the smell of spotted hyena feces, it will scare away many herbivores, which is obviously a phenomenon that spotted hyenas do not want to see, so gradually they will develop the habit of fixing the "public toilet" to defecate.
In addition, it is true to say that the spotted hyena scavenging, but the development of the earth so far, almost all carnivores have opportunism, they will be more inclined to obtain easier to obtain food, and carrion is one of the easiest to obtain food, so that is to say, the vast majority of carnivores have scavenging properties, not only spotted hyenas, and carrion occupies a small proportion in the food composition of spotted hyenas.
Spotted hyena nest
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > spotted hyenas do not often scaveng or "steal" prey</h1>
In the grasslands, spotted hyenas are portrayed as obscene "thieves", often "robbing" leopards, lions of prey, but in fact, lions, as the overlord of the grassland, the strength is far greater than the spotted hyena, saying that spotted hyenas often "rob" the lion's prey, just as it is as unrealistic as saying that ordinary people can catch up with sprinters, whether in the Galengeti savannah or other areas where the spotted hyenas overlap with lions in Africa, the number of times the lion snatches the prey of the spotted hyena is much higher than the number of times the spotted hyena grabs the lion's prey.
Spotted hyenas compete with lions for food
Of course, the most important food source of the spotted hyena is still hunting, the spotted hyena is one of the most skilled hunters in the African savannah, its success rate of hunting alone is 26%, when it hunts in groups, the success rate soars to 46%, much higher than the 17%-19% of lions hunting alone, and 30% of group hunting.
With such a high hunting success rate, spotted hyenas naturally will not waste, their food is huge, an ordinary adult spotted hyena can eat about 14 kg of food in one meal, 35 spotted hyenas can eat a whole zebra in half an hour, plus they have the largest group size in the carnivorous order, so it is far from satisfying to rob "others" of prey, or scavenging, spotted hyenas must actively hunt, and the prey must be medium and large ungulates, usually 56-182 kg, The big hyena can't be done, and the small one is not enough to eat.
Spotted hyenas prey on zebras
As mentioned earlier, the current carnivores on the earth are more inclined to prey that are easier to prey, and carrion is one of the most easily obtained foods, so why can't spotted hyenas actively seek carrion, not hunt? It has to do with the environment in which it is located.
The African savannah has the largest group of "scavengers" in the world, such as vultures, brown hyenas, black-backed jackals, etc., they are better at finding carrion than spotted hyenas, so in the face of such a high pressure, spotted hyenas cannot survive by looking for carrion to fill their hunger.
A battle between spotted hyenas and vultures
We can see this in the very different lifestyles of the two species, lion and tiger, and tigers in Asian forests have the habit of "hiding food", that is, if they catch large prey and can't finish eating, they will hide the remaining food so that they can eat it next time.
The lions in the African savannah have almost no habit of "hiding food", in fact, it is not that the lion does not want to hide, but there are a large number of "scavengers" in the African savannah, no matter how you hide, they can always find and eat, so why should the lion do these "useless work"? In other words, why should the spotted hyena focus on finding carrion?
lion
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > about the bite force of spotted hyenas</h1>
Regarding the spotted hyena, there is also a more typical rumor, that is, its bite force exceeds that of lions and tigers, but in fact, there are many factors affecting the bite force, such as weight, age, physiological state, different teeth, etc., so there is no premise to say that the bite force of the spotted hyena exceeds that of lions and tigers, which is incorrect.
The reason why there are rumors that the bite force of spotted hyenas exceeds that of lions mainly originated from a popular science program in the early years, in which researchers measured the bite force of a one-year-old large spotted hyena at 271 kg, which is similar to the bite force of an adult lion measured at 311 kg.
But is the show's data really accurate? In fact, this result is full of loopholes, first of all, the difference in measurement methods, when measuring the bite force of the lion, people first put the bite force measuring instrument on the meat piece tied to the tree, expecting the lion to bite, but the lion eventually just licked the meat and left.
Later, people improved the measurement method, wrapped the instrument with a deer's head to attract the lion to come and bite, and later the lion was indeed attracted to it, and ran away with the meat, so people measured 311 kg. The biggest loophole in this measurement method is that the lion does not need to use all its strength to bite, it only needs to use the strength to bite the meat, so the measured data has no reference significance.
Measure the bite force of a lion
The way to measure the spotted hyena is to combine the bite force measuring instrument with the "feeding", in simple terms, as long as the hyena bites the metal device hard, there will be a steady stream of milk flowing out, the spotted hyena in order to get more food, will desperately continue to bite the instrument, and the final measured bite force data is more accurate.
Of course, there is also a big loophole in this experiment is that the teeth used in the two are not the same, the spotted hyena bite is mostly split teeth and molars, while the lions use canine teeth and incisors to run with prey, and there is no comparison between different tooth bite forces.
Measure the bite force of spotted hyenas
So what is the true bite force data of spotted hyenas? In 2005, there was a paper in the "Life Sciences" that may be able to solve the mystery for us, the author is Stephen Rowe et al., an expert at the University of Sydney's College of Biological Sciences, who studied the canine tooth bite force of many common animals, and found that under the same conditions, the canine tooth bite force of marsupial species is much larger than that of placenta, omnivorous bears, although the bite force is not high under the same conditions, but counting the weight factor, can also have good biting force data.
The researchers measured 69.1 kg of spotted hyenas, its canine tooth bite force of 773N, bite force quotient (animal bite force divided by the return of the quotient of its weight, simply put, the unit bite force) is 117, and a 294.6 kg lion, its canine tooth bite force is 1768N, bite force quotient is 112, from this data, even if the same size of lions and spotted hyenas, the canine tooth bite force will not be too bad, but the actual lion size is far more than the spotted hyena, so its canine tooth bite force is naturally more than the hyena.
Biting force data for some animals
Through the detailed explanation of this article, has there been any improvement in the animal of the spotted hyena? In fact, many rumors begin with prejudice, and it is undeniable that spotted hyenas behave "extremely cruelly" when preying, often before the prey has died, but as a predator who is not super top, taking the most effective means of hunting is the smartest approach, and the spotted hyena undoubtedly does this. Therefore, we cannot use human subjective emotions to substitute for wild animals, which will have a certain impact on our correct understanding of animals.
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