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Community or Nepotism? Israeli Researchers Prove Hyenas 'Inherit' Friendship
Not only do the hyena kids have the same friends as Mom, but the higher in rank she is, the better the babies do in life
It takes a village, they say. The same tenet applies, it turns out, to our friend the spotted hyena.
Hyenas are neither dogs nor cats. They are cousins of meerkats and mongooses, of all things. Hyenas exist throughout Africa and Asia and reportedly some still cling on in Israel, though, sadly, massive packs of the carnivorous beasts are a thing of the past in the Holy Land. Nor is the U.S. thronged with hyenas, which died out there almost a million years ago.
Yet now collaboration between an Israeli researcher, Dr. Amiyaal Ilany of Bar-Ilan University with Dr. Erol Akçay of the University of Pennsylvania, working on enormous reams of data created by Kay Holekamp of Michigan University, has shed light on the Hyaenidae social life: for the spotted hyena, social ties are inherited.
Their paper, “Rank-dependent social inheritance determines social network structure in spotted hyenas,” was published Thursday in Science.