Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Hyenas

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why hyenas are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5Get tickets to see us LIVE at the London Podcast Festival this September: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/comedy/secretly-incredibly-fascinating/

Hyenas. Known for weird laughter. Famous for weird henchman stuff. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why hyenas are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of hyenas? I like them. I think they're cool and they got a good sense of humor. You know those hyenas from The Lion King and they're always laughing, making jokes, trying to kill kids. That was a good movie. No, I actually find them very interesting. And there's so much about their social structures, their anatomy, that is interesting. There's multiple species of hyenas. And I do think they very much deserve more, I guess, understanding than what we get from sort of the Lion King version of them, which is that they are, you know,

greedy a-holes that just steal food, which is not the whole truth. Yeah. Okay, good. This was very revelatory for me and along a lot of those lines because the lion king really looms large in my mind and i think most people's concept of hyenas and we'll talk about that specific species and others too also the lion king looms large in the sky remember that scene where the lion king is like a big cloud with this episode episode on my mind, now I'm seeing that cloud message is basically, you need to fight hyenas. Go fight. I've come from heaven to tell you,

hyenas stink. They're bad. Listen, me and Jesus had a talk, and we both agree that hyenas don't have souls. You can kill as many of them as you want. You think in heaven I would just get endless kitty treats and be very much at peace and not seek revenge. But no, I've been stewing this whole time. Kill them all, son.

Or else you're dead to me. More dead than I am. Ho, ho, ho. That's a joke. And an angel rolling its eyes somehow. I don't know. They didn't really show other parts of heaven in the movie. Anyway. Yeah, and lions are very relevant to this hyena topic. And my main hyena story as a person is that when I was a zoo tour guide at the wonderful Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, Illinois area, the zoo I worked at did not have hyenas, but it had a wonderful species called African

wild dogs, also called Cape dogs. And I basically just had to constantly tell people that, no, those aren't hyenas. I'm sorry, because they knew them from The Lion King. Those are the painted dogs, right? They're also called painted dogs? Yeah. Yeah, those are amazing. African painted dogs too. Yeah, they're so pretty. But people who saw The Lion King were like, are those hyenas?

And I would say no. And they would say, do you have hyenas elsewhere? And I would say no. And then that was the end of the conversation. They were disappointed. Yeah, well. And also just one fast programming note. The last chunk of the episode after the break will cover a lot of kinds of things in a human sex ed class, but for hyenas. So I don't know. Some people listen with very young kids. Maybe

you just don't want technical language about sex around them. I don't know. It's not like dirty or anything, but that'll come up at the end. There's a certain body part that resembles a hot dog that will be discussed vis-a-vis hyenas. I'm glad you know where this is going. Great. Good. Oh, yeah. Oh, Alex, do you know who I am?

Not surprised at all. I'm just glad. Yeah. Number one hyena anatomy enjoyer has logged on. And, folks, on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called... Sometimes all I count is one, two. Fun stats in the month that's named June.

Sinewave's been faking me out. It's time for statistics now. Perfect. That name was submitted by Trevor Galvin. Thank you, Trevor. We have a new name every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit yours to Discord or to SifPod at gmail.com.

I play sometimes Just Dance. It's the Switch game for exercise where you dance really bad. But the screen says you're dancing good, which makes me feel good. And that's one of the songs that I would dance to. Now Alex's version is just going to be in my head every time I'm like trying to get the points for putting my foot in the right area. Yeah, it's exercise and math. It's like a third of a school day.

Right. Right? That's pretty good. We should combine recess with math. Solve this equation or you get hit with this ball. Yeah, remember nerds and jocks have to work together. Right. They bond at last. And we've got ourselves a movie.

So let's get into these statistics about hyenas. Yeah. And the first number this week is three or four. Because depending on your research source, you'll find experts saying there's either three or four main species of modern hyenas. That doesn't surprise me. There's one that is kind of included or not. And there can be like really heated debate over whether they're like species or subspecies or just the same species, but living in different regions. Yeah. And this is one where it's pretty clear there's four different animals and there's disagreement about whether one of them qualifies as a hyena or whether it's too different.

Oh, interesting. There's three species that are definitely agreed on as hyenas. Okay. The physically largest, maybe the most famous, is the spotted hyena, which is the kind in The Lion King. That's what they're going for. Those are the jock hyenas. Spotted hyenas, they live in sub-Saharan Africa, often on savannas like the ones in The Lion King. Their fur is more of a brown color. They're more gray

in the movie, but otherwise the spots and the shapes are pretty much that thing, the spotted hyena. Yeah, they're definitely less Mad Max looking than they are in The Lion King movies. Like they're actually, I think, very pretty animals. Yeah, I really recommend looking at photos of hyenas, not just the drawing. They are very cute. Yeah. Pretty much across the board. They got like rounded ears, cute little noses. Yes, especially those ears.

Yeah, it's good. I just want to give them a big cuddle, have them chew my face off. They would chew your face off. Yeah, don't do that, folks. They probably would. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then two other species are the brown hyena. Brown hyenas live in the southern end of Africa. And then the striped hyena. And there's a lot of subspecies of that in northern Africa, eastern Africa, also the Middle East and Arabia and India. And the striped hyena is the official national animal of Lebanon.

Ooh. So the country of Lebanon in the Middle East, that's their national animal, the striped hyena. You really do have to look at images of the brown hyena and striped hyena because they are such scenesters, like their little stripes and their emo hairdos. They are very seen. Yes. Small and fashionable. Yeah. I like it. scene. Yes. Small and fashionable. Yeah. I like it. Can I guess, uh, like is the one that's like maybe a, maybe a hyena or, uh, the debate is whether aardwolves are, uh, related to hyenas? Ding, ding, ding. Yes. Yes, of course. Yeah. I say of course Katie knows, but listeners, Yeah. I say, of course, Katie knows, but listeners, you're surprised. Yes.

Yeah. And the aardwolf is just very related to hyenas and also has a few differences where some sources are like, no, that's its own thing. Right. But yeah, the aardwolf is this possible fourth hyena. Aardwolves are like fairy versions of hyenas. They are much smaller and more kind of like, I mean, I guess compared to the brown and the striped hyenas, they're actually not that different, but they are definitely more like fox-like, smaller. They are so cute.

They are incredibly cute. I mean, I know I said that the spotted hyenas are cute as well. To be fair, I think everything's cute, but these are like cute in a way that everyone will agree with me that they are cute. Yeah, I might have presented these in order of ascending cuteness. It's debatable, but we got smaller and smaller and more and more fairy-like, like you said. This all goes into a mini takeaway number one. One possible type of hyena eats nothing but termites. And that's kind of the biggest reason some naturalists separate art worlds out,

is that the spotted and striped and brown hyenas are what's known as bone-cracking hyenas. They have skulls and jaws and teeth built to crack the bones. Nice bone-cracking. And that's just metal. It's great. It's very metal. But then the aardwolf is an animal that goes around licking up basically nothing but termites. And that's the main thing it eats in very arid parts of Eastern and Southern Africa. That's why they're called like aardwolves, right? Like it's kind of a play on aardvark.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's spelled with two A's on the front, like an aardvark. And that's from Dutch and Afrikaans languages. And it means earth wolf, like an aardvark is also an earth animal that eats termites and insects. Yeah. So then what's a vark? Aardvark is earth pig. Aardwolf, easier to translate to English, is earth wolf. Again, this is a cute animal, but it pretty much looks like a hyena, right? If I saw it around, I would assume it eats rabbits or some kind of prey that I associate with predators. rabbits or like some kind of prey that I associate with predators. No, they just lick up termites with their pretty long tongues. And a single aardwolf can consume 200,000 termites in one night.

200,000 termites. Wow. Because it's also pretty big for a termite eater. It needs to kill a lot. That's a huge kill count. That's way more than like their big, beefy cousins. Like that's, you know, if you're going based on size, like what's the deadliest animal? It's like a blue whale because it kills so many krill. Yeah, the spotted hyena thinks it's cool for eating one gazelle or something. No, 200,000 termites. Keep up. Did you like massacre an entire termite civilization in a night?

I do want to add this guy to my list of adorable little animals that just like go around killing tons of tiny things every night, which the other member of that list is the black-footed cat. It's very cute. It's very tiny. And it just kills enormous amounts of tiny, like, rodents and insects every night. That's great. I'm so team cat. I'm just in the tank for any cat, even if it's a mighty predator. Yeah. I mean, but that's an interesting thing about hyenas and aardwolves. They're not felines, but they're not exactly closely related to, say, a dog, but they are in a similar sort of, they look similar to dogs in a way, but they are like, say the paint, so like the African painted frog or painted frog, the African dog or the African painted dog is more closely related to a wolf and to our domesticated dogs than, like, say, any hyena is, including the aardwolf, to dogs. Yes, that was a huge surprise to me.

One source this week is a book called Felids and Hyenas of the Worlds. It's a Princeton Field Guide by naturalist Jose R. Castillo. Because one of the biggest reasons people do categorize aardwolves with the other three hyenas is that all four of them have a bunch of dog-like physical features, but are much closer related to cats and are much more genetically similar to cats than they are to stuff like dogs and bears. Yeah. Which is unique. So that's why they're related.

And it also made me think about the Nickelodeon cartoon CatDog. You know, that's cool. It's good to think about. Oh, yeah. CatDog. Genetic, a genetic nightmare, an abomination. Where does it poop from? They never teach us that.

I was so annoyed once they like teased an episode where we would find out how cat dog poops and then they didn't show us and you know what that's just that's false advertisement folks I want to know how it poops anyways yeah no it's really it is really cool because it's like a kind of an example of how you will have certain evolutionary features right where the hyenas features look very dog-like, but yeah, they are more closely related to cats. But then you also have animals that look very cat-like, like civets, but they are not cats.

So it's just, you cannot judge a carnivore or an insectivore by the way it is. That's a phrase that surely will catch on. And with that carnivorousness, the next number here is 2021. 2021 is the year when a prehistoric hyena bone discovery debunked a myth about a group of Neanderthals. This is about hyenas hunting and not the aardwolf type or its bugs, the other three. So this would be like an ancestor of type of hyenas that hunt for food, like, or sorry, that hunt for, say, gazelles or whatever.

Yeah. And the bonus show this week is about prehistoric hyenas. But briefly, we think there were about 70 different species of hyena in lots more places than the current ranges of Africa and the Middle East and South Asia. And according to the New York Times, there was a dig back in 1939, and they examined a coastal cave site in Italy near modern Rome. Hey! Dig in 1939, they found a well-preserved Neanderthal skull. And based on how it looked and how it had some holes in it, they thought that this meant the Neanderthals there were practicing ritual cannibalism. But then a new dig in 2021 found lots more bones and many of them had hyena tooth marks. And instead, we think that this cave was not

Neanderthals eating each other. It was hyenas eating all sorts of things, including Neanderthals, and then making a pantry of the bones and the meat and everything. Oh, man. These hyenas were creating, it sounds like, a bone throne, which is terrifying. Yeah, it's very Warhammer illustrations that I've seen. Yeah, it's very that. Yeah. Just, you know, it's funny because I think that it is easy to forget that we used to be potentially prey for a lot of these animals. We didn't have our fancy civilizations to protect us from their

hunger. So if you get caught unawares, you know, a human versus like a pack of hyenas and you don't have a gun, it's not going to necessarily end up going your way. Yeah. And yeah, we'll talk about ways that even current hyenas, not just some kind of bigger prehistoric one, current hyenas are amazing hunters and from time to time attack or eat a human. It's rare. It's sort of like lion attacks on humans. It's very rare and happens once in a while. So it's even still a thing a little bit. Yeah. I mean, you know, don't hate the player, hate the game. Yeah. And the game is, you know, eating people, I guess. Because another number about the game is more than 7,000 years. More than 7,000 years is how long a group of striped hyenas have been assembling a giant ongoing bone pantry in what's now Saudi Arabia.

Like to this day. They do like the bone throne. Yeah. Welcome to the bone zone. This is our bone throne. It's a little bit like the Lion King hyenas, but I think it's just because they hung out in elephant graveyards in the movie, you know, but this is like just hyenas gathering all kinds of kills, including a few humans. I mean, of course, that's metal. But do we know why they do that? Because that's really interesting that they maintain like, you know, a literal bone zone and collect things in one area. Is it just force of habit?

Is there some advantage to having a giant pile of bones? Yeah, we don't exactly know, but it seems like it's a little bit social. It's a little bit storing the kill for a little bit of time and just then they don't move the bones somewhere after. It also seems like some of the species like caves or dens or just a place to be in. Right. So they just never clean. Yeah.

It's like a dorm room where they never clean the bones of the Miller Lite cans that they leave laying about, and it just accumulates over thousands of years. Yes, exactly. Yeah, they're just like, why bother removing these bones from where we stored the kill for a day or two? Right. So they're not constructing. They're just like leaving stuff.

Yeah. I bet they never wash their fitted sheets. I love it. I feel like it's interesting because it's kind of endearing to me that the hyenas create bone rooms. I don't know. It's cute somehow.

It's so elaborate. And the other possible reason is that it's just a little bit compulsive or something. I don't know. It's cute somehow. It's so elaborate. And the other possible reason is that it's just a little bit compulsive or something. I know we said they're not that related to dogs, but like a dog's interest in an old bone, you know, it might just be fun. Yeah, they like the smells, the must, the ghosts. They're like those monks that like would live in the catacombs. It's very catacomb. Through like boredom and virginity would create bone chandeliers and bone tables and these elaborate bone furnishings. I'm not making this up.

This is not a bit. There are catacombs. I can't pull out the name of one right now. pull out the name of one right now. But yeah, just various catacombs where the monks there would be like, yeah, just going to make a bone dining table and some bone chairs, bone napkin holder. Especially you being in Central Europe. I feel like there's a lot of idyllic European locations where you're like, what are the top tourist destinations in this city? And they're like, you should go under Paris, man. There's a bunch of skulls.

Like what? Yeah. Huh? Eiffel Tower? No, no skulls. Wall of skulls. Yeah. It's like Legoland, but it's bones in a mausoleum.

Yeah. It's the Sedlic ossuary. It's a Roman Catholic chapel chandelier made out of bones. There's all this like art, I guess if you call it that, made out of bones. And it's just, I mean, they must have been so bored and just used to the bones, right? You live there and you're like, well, all my friends are bones. I might as well create a chandelier out of femurs. I don't know.

Right. These bones are just laying around. Right. Anyways, we're just like hyenas. We share so much with the animal kingdom. Yeah, hyenas are almost at that step. And this site in Saudi Arabia, it was basically found by a German research team, again, in 2021. They're from the Max Planck Institute.

They were exploring the Harat Kaibar lava field of northwest Saudi Arabia. They were going through lava tubes, like natural lava caves. And when they took one interesting turn, they found more than 100,000 bones from at least 14 different animal species, including cattle, horses, camels, and humans. Bones in my lava tube? Now that is creepy. I was only expecting lava in these lava tubes, not bones.

Right. I thought I was in an underground level in Mario, and now I'm also in Castlevania or something? Get out of here. Yeah. Stop it. So do they know like how long the hyenas would like maintain, actively maintain the bone pile? Do the hyenas maintain the bone, like keep adding to the bone piles for like hundreds of years?

Yeah. It seems like it's relatively continuous for more than 7,000 years. And they're probably not consciously thinking of themselves as curators or maintainers or anything. It's just that there's been striped hyenas here. Now, you don't know that. You don't. That's true. I haven't interviewed them. You don't know that they don't see themselves as bone docents. Would you like to see the bone sculpture made out of Neanderthal and fox skulls?

No, you just want to know where the bathroom is? Okay, it's right over there. Also made out of bones. That's true. There's so many zoo or museum docents with one bone. And then the Hyena version is like, would you like to see more than 100,000 bones? Yeah. Like just so many. It's like I saw Galileo's middle finger in that museum in Florence. But imagine if it was that, but all of Galileo's bones and all his friends' bones.

Yeah, just every Italian bone. Yeah, there you go. Every Italian bone is actually a movie that you can only rent in certain special stores. Next number here is another famous hyena thing. The number is about a dozen. Next number here is another famous hyena thing. The number is about a dozen. And that's the number of different vocalizations a spotted hyena can make.

About a dozen different vocalizations. Yeah, it's not just that little hyena giggle thing. There's a lot of stuff that they can make. A lot of sounds that are all quite haunting, but also, in my opinion, a little cute. And we'll play the giggle in a sec. But that brings us to takeaway number two. Some hyenas do make a sound that's like a human laugh, but that sound is communicating fear and anxiety. The spotted hyena species specifically is the supposed laughing one,

but it's, yeah, I had some sources that were like, it's totally different from humans. And I feel like they had not heard of nervous laughter before. Have you met any human laughing away our anxiety and unease is like our number one thing. Yeah, it's just that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, the sound is much more like a human laugh than I expected vocally and just the tone of it. But it is a different social phenomenon than comedy laughter and joy laughter, for sure. We'll play you folks a quick clip of the laughing type sound.

Here is that sound. But yeah, that sound, it reminds me of human laughter, like the tone, actually. I thought it would be more of a myth. And I think that maybe that's one reason we find them a little threatening, right? Because there's that cognitive dissonance between like, hey, that's sort of a jovial sound. But it is coming from an animal that likes to create a bone throne out of our own skulls. So that's not great. Right. The scavenging and the predatoryness and stuff. Yeah. It can be a little Batman's the Joker, I guess. Yeah. Right. Because like we sort of we lionize lions a bit, even though they're

just as likely to want to like chew our faces off, right? If not more likely to kill us. But we're like, oh, the lion is noble and the hyena is what a creep. I mean, yeah, it's like any socially awkward person when you're laughing inappropriately and you have a giant collection of bones. It puts us off a little bit. Unfairly, I think. Exactly. Yeah. And we'll talk more later about spotted hyena society and hierarchy, but it's very strict and important, the hierarchy in a spotted hyena group. So that laughing sound

tends to be an expression of, leave me alone, don't mess with me, you are more powerful, or possibly just general worry about what's going to happen among the group with a more dominant hyena. And yeah, and I'm also going to link NPR's interview with UC Berkeley professor Frederick Tejanusen, who has worked very closely with spotted hyenas. It turns out until a few years ago, UC Berkeley in the Bay Area had a spotted hyena colony near the college where they observed and researched spotted hyenas. And they recorded about a dozen different vocalizations. There's a strange deep groaning sound.

There's a low, slow whoop sound. And there's all sorts of different specific meanings of those. So it's very interesting verbal communication. meanings of those. So it's very interesting verbal communication. You had to be very cautious when a biology student would offer to take you to the bone zone at Berkeley during this time. Because it might not turn out to be a hyena. Because it might not be a hyena enclosure, which was what you were hoping for. Yeah. I can't believe I'm having sex. This stinks. Oh, geez. I wanted to see hyenas. This isn't an interesting relative of felids. Darn it.

And this also leads to our next takeaway, because takeaway number three. Except for two specific elements, the Lion King is basically anti-hyena propaganda. Yes, thank you. Somebody's brave enough to say it. If you were like a lion trying to make a propaganda movie in the war against hyenas, you would make Disney's 1994 The Lion King. That's what you would do. It's basically Red Dawn. It's like red dawn for hyenas or red dawn for lions it is ridiculous anti-hyena propaganda there it's yeah and it's like very like pro-lion propaganda as well like that lions are these magnanimous creatures that maintain the

balance of the African savannah. And it's like, yes, it is true that it's important. Their role is important there, you know, as is any predator like the gray wolf in their role in maintaining the balance in their environment. But, you know, they do it because they want to eat, you know, they're not like, oh, yes, the balance of life. They're like, that looks like a tasty zebra. I want to bite into its ass.

Yeah. Yeah. They don't care. They're just eating stuff. It's pretty dang convenient that they're like, we're the kings and we, you know, take care of this land. Also, I'm going to eat some of my subjects every so often. But I'll do it in like a kingly way versus like the evil way that the hyenas and Scar do it, which literally causes the weather to go bad. It doesn't make any dang sense.

Yeah, they really demonize hyenas for eating. They need to eat, folks. Yeah. Why can't they eat food? I don't know. I don't. It's like, why are they so jazzed about food? Like, have they not been getting enough food?

And it's not how it works. It's a much more complicated thing than just like hyenas go and like steal food, which is also, you know, I mean, there are plenty of animals that are pretty much just like kleptoparasites. That means an animal who steals from other animals, essentially, to get food, including seagulls. They love to do that. Yeah, yeah.

But generally speaking, it's usually animals that practice kleptoparasitism also gather food for themselves because it's not a tenable strategy to only do that. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, Especially these hyenas being carnivorous and needing kills, you know, you kind of get it where you can get it. And so, yeah, it just makes sense for how they eat and live. Yeah. Yeah. And this takeaway, there's two books that are key sources. One is The Social Lives of Animals. That's by University of Sydney biology professor Ashley Ward. Another book called How the Zebra Got Its

Stripes by biologist Leo Grasset. And then also a few internet sources, including Disney sites. Because one thing I was curious about is why hyenas is such a villain in the movie The Lion King, which came out in 1994. Turns out that hyenas weren't the first pick. It turns out in the long pre-production of The Lion King, their initial idea for Scars Henchmen was African painted dogs, African wild dogs. Oh, interesting. And they changed it to hyenas later when they decided the story would be set in Eastern Africa. And those those painted dogs mostly live in Southern Africa. So they said, for habitat reasons, let's do hyenas instead, because there are spotted

hyenas there. I actually really respect that. Yeah. Although African painted dogs also weird to just be like, yeah, they're the villains. They're adorable and fluffy and they look like a Snickers bar. They do look like a Snickers bar. Wow. I'm kind of kidding about the anti-hyena propaganda. Like Disney's not out to get them, but they really went off once they picked hyenas for the movie. They really went way out of pocket.

Yeah. I love them, though, as characters. Let me just say, like, those trio, fantastic. Yeah. And, like, it's really evocative and stuff. In order to write a good versus evil story in particular that they feel children can understand, they kind of did the opposite of a lot of hyena facts and a lot of things about spotted hyenas. One is that spotted hyenas live in tightly organized clans with clear boundaries and systems among themselves. And it's not this

thing where they're just kind of squabbling like the hyenas in The Lion King. There is a form of arguing with each other, but they're very put together, almost more like that lion pride. Yeah. There is a certain truth, though, about because I think the female hyena voiced by Whoopi Goldberg in the movies, it tends to be sort of a little more dominant. Yeah. sort of a little more dominant. Yeah. And female spotted hyenas can often take a very active dominant role in the hyena hierarchy. Exactly. And at the top of the takeaway, I said there's two specific ways the Lion King is accurate.

And one is that in spotted hyena groups, it's matriarchal, it's female dominated. That is how it works. So they did okay with that. Yeah. Amazing. Also, she's great. Whoopi Goldberg or the character? Both. Yeah. Great. Yes. Yes. And also Shinzi. I love her. That's her name? Shinzi? Yeah. And then Bonsai. And then a hyena named Ed, who's just like tongue out and silly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. hyena named Ed, who's just like tongue out and silly. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then the movie also acts like the hyenas kind of need to usurp lion society to get enough food. And in reality, hyenas are excellent hunters. Yes. And in particular, they're what's called cursorial hunters. This is another use of that Latin word for a runner. Cursorial hunters primarily distance run in a way that wears out their prey. So hyenas, in a very high effort and disciplined way, chase down prey. Yeah, and that's how human hunting was. We're not necessarily the fastest or the strongest animals, but we have a lot of endurance and exhausting the prey.

Yeah, it's very relatable. If you want to have a movie where animals are sort of relatable to humans, you would kind of pick hyenas to be the protagonists. Also, hyenas are framed as just kind of scavengers, but they hunt about as much as they scavenge. And it turns out lions also scavenge and lions even scavenge a little bit more than hyenas do. Yes, this is key. So basically, lions and hyenas will steal from each other. The theft goes both ways and lions sometimes have an easier time bullying hyenas because the lions are bigger than hyenas. So hyenas really need to have a big enough group that they can defend their kills from lions. Or if they want to steal something from a lion, they really need a large group of numbers. And it's a pretty,

they're kind of the underdogs in that situation. Exactly. Yeah. And according to Ashley Ward's book, there's a usual ratio For the amount of hyenas it takes To defeat a lion Apparently it's four hyenas to a lion The hyenas will probably win Yeah, that checks out I'm paraphrasing the movie, but in the movie

It feels like Simba beats up like a hundred Hyenas, and that wouldn't really be how it goes About four of them could take him Yeah, yeah, yeah It's also kind of portrayed where it's like, it takes like an, a huge group of hyenas to like, I guess, rip Scar to shreds. Oh yeah. Given that Scar is kind of scrawny, it really would only take probably the three to take him down. Right. The three ones that have names. Yeah. That's an average ratio. That's your replacement level lion to use baseball saber metrics. Yeah.

Right. Yeah, and hyenas are really not much dirtier or cleaner than lions. They're a combination of aggressive and loving in their interactions with each other. They're devoted parents. They're committed to their group. Hyenas and lions both steal kills from each other. They both act kind of similar. The other way the Lion King is somewhat accurate is just framing hyenas and lions as rivals because that is kind of true, but not how the movie does it. They're rivals because they're so similar and they share so many characteristics in terms of how they socialize and eat and live. They are in the

same ecological niche and so they're going to compete. Yeah. So the Lion King, I still think it's a good movie. It's just like once you learn about spotted hyenas, it's like this is a very dark take on a pretty wonderful animal. Like they really go all out to make a fable that children can understand. And they misrepresent hyenas along the way. Yeah. You know, I think with a few tweaks, they could have really still made it a good children's movie because I feel like kids are a lot more perceptive than we give them credit for. So I think if you had basically shown the hyenas

as being exploited, like and manipulated by Scar, which they kind of hinted at a little bit, but if they leaned more into it, right, where Scar is just kind of like exploiting the hyenas who feel some grievance, right? You know, it's like, it felt a little bit like they were going in that direction, right? Where he happily betrays the hyenas at the end and the hyenas are like well i guess we're gonna rip you to shreds um and silhouette because it's a children's movie uh it would have been more interesting to have the hyenas be a more morally complex uh group of animals which is kind of what they did in the squeakquel, you know, where it's like two groups of lions fighting, where it's like the bad lions and the good lions.

And at the end of the movie, there's like a Romeo and Juliet situation. And at the end of the movie, they're like, hey, but we're all lions, man. And they all sing and dance. Yeah. The Lion King 2 is pretty all right. People don't know. Yeah. Has a lot going on. Some good songs. It's got some stuff in there. It's got more lions.

More lions, yeah. And also the title is a pun. The Pride of Simba is a pun because it's also Pride Cometh Before the Fall. Yeah. And Simba, you know, he's kind of a jerk in that movie, but in a way that's understandable. And the first movie's title is a pun because the lions are lying. Am I right? Frauds.

Fake. Hyenas are fine. It's propaganda. Stop it. The king of lies. Well, folks, we're going to take a quick break. And then when we return, we have a mega takeaway of stuff they super couldn't put in The Lion King about anatomy and other stuff. Yay. Hot dog, Alex.

I wonder what we're going to talk about. Oh, the picture we're going to link. This is great. See you in a sec. Folks, one in five Americans have learn a new language on their bucket list. And if that's you, make 2024 the year you finally check it off the list with Babbel. That's right, Babbel. Yes, Babbel. I'm un-American, but I'm living in Italy. And guess

what language they speak here? Please say English. Please say English. Please say English. Oops. No, it's Italian. So it turns out I kind of need to learn that. And Babble is an... Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. I love stuff like Babble because it compresses these lessons into chunks, which feels a lot more doable in a day where I can take 10 minutes out of my day. It's like, I've got 10 minutes. Yeah, I love that I can just pick up more of a language at home in a system built by experts. And it feels simple. It feels properly put together. It's on any device I want it to be.

And it's great. And I'm excited to like travel in Europe a bit in the future because we're doing a London show and stuff. So I want to pick up some of the European languages besides English that I'm, as folks know, at least medium good at. With Babbel's model, it's more, it feels kind of like the sorts of early learning stuff that you need in the language where it's less esoteric, just like vocabulary that you don't need. It's more rooted in what are you most likely to encounter in terms of needing to communicate first. And it seems built in that trajectory,

like it gets more complex as you get more developed. Totally. I once tried a different method of learning a little bit of a language, and it was French. And one of the first words they taught me was horse. I don't really need that right away. You know, like it was very confusing. Babel, I've had a much more practical and better experience. Unless you do have you did bring a horse to Paris and it gets free.

And then you're like, oh, no. Sacre bleu, mon cheval. Yeah. I mean, where's better to propose marriage to my horse than Paris, right? That's the city of light. Yeah, put that one big ring on its hoof right in front of the Tower of Eiffel. I just called it the Tower of Eiffel. Clearly, I need to use Babel more.

Me too. And here's a special limited time deal for our listeners. Right now, get up to 60% off your Babbel subscription, but only for our listeners of SIF at babbel.com slash SIF. You get up to 60% off at babbel.com slash SIF. That's spelled B-A-B-B-E-L.com slash SIF. Rules and restrictions apply. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam.

All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls.

Folks, we're back and with mega takeaway number four. Spotted hyenas live in a matriarchal feudal society ruled by females with pseudo penises. Pseudo weenies. And it's the spotted hyena specifically. It's not so this way with the other hyena types or art wolf, but it's kind of the most famous hyena, not just because of the Lion King. And it's much different than I expected in several ways in terms of how they socialize and their anatomy. Yeah. So the pseudopenis is really, really interesting just from sort of a behavioral and evolutionary perspective.

And it's also really mind bending in terms of like it's a female and they got to give birth somehow out of that thing. And it's not in The Lion King because they decided kids aren't up for it. And that probably makes sense. Again, one source here is Jose Castillo's book about felids and hyenas. He says that the brown hyena and the striped hyena, they'll live in small clans of just a few hyenas, but they mostly forage alone. They also tend to be very nocturnal. Aardwolf species is totally solitary and nocturnal. They only come together to mate. But the spotted hyena, they live in very complex clans and are awake both in the day and the night, depending on what they're up to. They also have particularly different sexual and anatomical relations

because the male spotted hyena, they have an external penis and scrotum. The female spotted hyena has a long enlarged clitoris, which can also engorge into interaction and is called a pseudo penis because in particular, visually, it looks almost exactly like the male hyena's penis. Yeah, and there's so many theories about why they have this. Yeah, we just know they're mimicking something, because Ashley Ward's book, he says that they even have labial tissue, which is shaped into a pseudo-scrotum. They're evolutionarily really trying to look like

the males in that way. Also in terms, it makes some sense because I think in embryonic development, at least for humans, we all start out with the same sort of like neuter, you know, embryo. And then for the female embryos, tissues like develop into labia and clitoris. And then for the males that continues to develop into testes and, you know, the glands, the same kind of group of stem cells in the embryo. Exactly. It's coming from an original root and then DNA expresses itself. And yeah, and the way that expresses for female hyenas is this pseudopenis that is a very important organ for them all around. It's also the vaginal opening. They also urinate out of their pseudopenis opening. And they also receive a male hyena's penis into it during intercourse. And they usually sort of retract the pseudopenis into their abdomen. And then the male has to very skillfully enter what's a relatively difficult opening. And then also the pseudopenis is where a hyena baby comes out. out. Yeah. It's like that scene in Star Wars where it's like, you know, you got to be able to shoot a womp rat from like 20 meters away in order to have sex with a female hyena. There were so many ways Star Wars could have gone. And that one is correct. That's good. Yeah. But yeah, it is fascinating because like in terms of mechanics of the plumbing, it doesn't actually make as much sense as the typical labia setup in terms of giving birth, right?

And in terms of sexual intercourse, like giving birth for hyenas is much more difficult and it actually has a higher rate of mortality than if they had a different situation. And, you know, also it makes mating a little more difficult, which is not necessarily a bad thing. If mating is trickier, sometimes that means that they're selecting for fitter males or they can exercise reproductive choice more easily. But especially with the birth situation, because that is genuinely less ideal in terms of giving birth. So the social or other selective pressures must be incredibly important such that it overcomes the discomfort and relative inefficiency of trying to fit a baby hyena through basically like this straw, this tube.

Yeah, yeah. It's very surprising infant and mother mortality and the birth process. And I also want to highlight one of the source links if people want to see this pseudopenis. And it's not an extreme picture. if people want to see this pseudopenis. And it's not an extreme picture. It's not a birth picture or anything. But the Goro Goro Hyena Project in Tanzania,

they have just side-by-side picture of the male penis and the female pseudopenis on spotted hyenas. And it looks pretty similar from far away. It's just something that in particular has thrown off some humans. Ashley Ward says there's anecdotes of zookeepers after many months of trying to get two hyenas to reproduce, finding out that the two hyenas are the same gender or sex as each other. Because it kind of looks the same and whoops, even if they like each other a lot, they just can't do it. I mean, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong. I don't think any of these theories have been really reliably proven to be true or not.

Like one of them is maybe it helped maintain sort of peace and balance in their little hyena society because it makes it difficult for males to tell the difference between juvenile hyenas. And so they can't like selectively kill young male hyenas. Maybe that's not the reason. Maybe it's more, you know, it's just that the females that have this, this pseudo penis can be more dominant and command more social, I guess, like play a more dominant social role. And so they end up passing on their genes, even if it's more difficult to give birth. It's a really interesting question.

Yeah, everything you said is right. Yeah, we don't exactly know. We think it's probably some element of how spotted hyenas socialize, in particular, because they're highly social. And those groups of spotted hyenas, they form very large clans. They are extremely hierarchical and they're completely female dominated. And Ashley Ward's book says it's to the point that every female outranks every male in a hyena clan. And he compares it almost to European medieval feudalism because when the most dominant female reproduces, if she has a daughter, that is immediately the number two ranking hyena, almost like a crown princess. It's completely matriarchal and structured like that. This is what every sort

of misogynist worries about in terms of feminism, that we're just going to turn into a hyena society where all women are queens and all men are serfs and that women are secretly hoping that this is our future. And, you know, it's not true at all. Hyena laughter, hyena laughter, hyena laughter hyena laughter hyena laughter yeah even like in spotted hyenas the females are just physically a little bit larger like it's a species where the females lead in a way that matches some tropes of male patriarchy and humans yeah but it again, a totally different species without our

morals or anything. They do some mounting as well, right? They do like dominance mounting, I thought, like the females where they'll mount other females as well as males in sort of a show of kind of ritualistic dominance. Yeah. And apparently there's a behavior called a social erection, which is not for romance or for having sex. It is engorging the parts. And then they'll do a thing where the more dominant hyena, which is female, gets behind the less dominant one, which is usually a male. And then the male has to present their penis erection to the female for inspection.

And then that's how they greet each other in a ritual of we're greeting each other and I'm more dominant as the female. Yeah, there are definitely essays written by fearful men about this kind of thing where they write some dystopia and it's some thinly veiled fetish. But it's true for hyena society. Yeah, it's like the backstory of Wonder Woman when you look into it. But even more so. Yeah.

Right. It's crazy that Stan Lee wrote all that stuff. Excelsior, he shouted about this. Yeah. Yeah. And like you mentioned, this genital situation, it also seems to mean that females and hyena species are able to choose their own partners and not just because of their dominance, also because it would just be extraordinarily physically and mechanically difficult for a male to force a female to have sex. And when I say force, that's in a non-moral sense. There are many animal species where what we call forced mating is how the males do it. But in hyenas, they pretty much both need to want to.

And even then, it's difficult, even if they both want to. Right. And even then it's difficult, even if they both want to. Right. Ducks is like the classic example of that, where you have the weird corkscrew shaped penis and then the females have a like labyrinthian vaginal canal. And that is because of this competition in terms of who gets to determine who gets to choose the mate. Right.

Basically, this is kind of like what is likely happening with these hyenas is that they are able to make some determination about fitness in terms of the males and then select which males they mate with because mechanically speaking, it's not going to happen. It's kind of like porcupines, actually, female porcupines. they have to allow the males to engage in coitus. Otherwise, it's just impossible. Yeah, hyena moms are apparently polygamous and probably the ones choosing the partners. And there's stories of a male hyena pursuing a female for weeks, basically just following them around, hoping to get permission to reproduce with them. So it's another way they're in charge. Yeah.

And then there's a whole nother element of these hyena clans socializing with their bodies, which is chemicals they make. Spotted hyenas, they produce a waxy secretion from their anal glands. And human scientists nicknamed this hyena butter. Because it's slippery and special. And hyena butter is not just a chemical that marks a location. It contains a bunch of information. I hate that. Don't call it hyena butter, you guys.

Too late. They did it. They did it. Yeah it yeah oh my gosh i mean i obviously i appreciate animal biology i have a whole show about it it's called creature feature you can check it out biologists sometimes pick the worst names for things. Hyena butter for anal secretions makes me so upset. I mean, the only worst thing you could have said, I guess, would be like hyena mayonnaise. Yeah, I think it's like thicker and more substantial than mayonnaise. That's why they call it butter. Sorry. Just call it hyena excretion. Just call it or hyena wax. I don't know. Anything but butter. I don't want to think about food when we're talking about hyena anal excretions.

It's like, well, I'm going to have some toast and this butter. Now I'm thinking about hyena ass. Thank you, scientists. Right. This is the one situation where it's like, can we go back to pseudopenises, please? And difficult mounting, please. Pseudopenis is a perfectly appropriate scientific name. Hyena Butter is, that is jail.

I'm calling the police. The thing about the Hyena Butter name is I think it understates how interesting it is because butter doesn't contain as much information as this does. Between their genetics and another thing they do, they're able to leave their personal signature in their hyena butter. They can indicate their sex, their hierarchy position, their reproductive state to other hyenas' sense of smell. And they do this by also including bacteria that are specific to their clan. What hyenas do is they rub each other's butter on each other's glands in a way that infects each other with a shared signature bacterial culture. shared signature bacterial culture. And so then to their sense of smell, they can also tell what clan the butter is from, which is hugely helpful for marking territory and kind of communicating with each other. Yeah, great. Rubbing their butt butter all over each

other and so that it grows the same bacteria so they can identify each other. That is beautiful. so they can identify each other. That is beautiful. Yeah. So between their butter and their vocalizations and their intelligence and vision, they're extremely good at identifying each other. Apparently they can recognize distant cousins, the spotted hyenas. Also, these communities will raise cubs together in communal dens. The females tend to stay, the males tend to need to go to a new clan and start at the bottom rung of that socially. It's a really intricate and interesting social species. And again, the Lion King acts like they're falling over their own paws and kind of wacky. And this is actually a very interesting and intelligent and social animal.

They do that sometimes like a new male will find a pride of female lions and kill their cubs. And they do that to ensure that she will mate with them because she won't mate until she won't go into estrus until her cubs are mature. The reason for that is that the male lion's life is very difficult and he's easily like usurped by another male. by another male. And so the core group of lions that like in a sort of like forms a pride that is more unchanging is usually the female lions. Cool. And they can sometimes like do a vote of no confidence and like kick out like a male lion if they don't like them. But yeah, so it's like, it's interesting because I think that

there's this simplistic view of like lion prides where it's like the guy's in charge, he's a king and he rules, like, you know, like the lion king thing. Another aspect about that is Simba would not like take over his pride. Females are more likely to stay within that pride, but Simba is more likely to go off and try to find a new pride, maybe kill all the offspring in that pride and then start his own lineage. But, you know, anyways, lion propaganda. The Lion King makes such a meal out of Nala finding Simba with Timon and Pumbaa and being like, you've derelicted your duty and where have you been? In real life, she'd just be running stuff. It'd be fine.

No, it's normal. She'd be like, oh, you were gone for a while? That's cool. Yeah, she'd be like, that's good because we're probably like pretty related because we're in the same pride. You should leave so that we, you know, don't inbreed too much. Don't want a genetic bottleneck over here. Otherwise, we get weird guys like your uncle.

I like the idea that every community in the Lion King has it together. And then Simba's just wandering around being weird instead. Yeah, there's like, have you heard of the Pride Rock Lions? I've heard they don't. Their males just stay there and they marry their cousins. Yeah, like the two embarrassing characters would be Simba and Ed the hyena. Yeah. Like some of the male hyenas, it does seem like they're kind of unembarrassing.

So yeah, yeah, they'd be friends. Yeah. hey folks that's the main episode for this week welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, one type of hyena lives on termites. Takeaway number two, spotted hyenas make a sound that's like a human laugh, but that sound communicates fear and anxiety. Takeaway number three, the Lion King is basically anti-hyena propaganda. The only accurate parts are hyenas being rivals of lions in a general way and a female hyena being the leader. Mega takeaway number four, spotted hyenas live in a matriarchal feudal society ruled by females with pseudo-penises.

Plus a ton of numbers this week about striped hyenas storing bones for thousands of years, brown hyenas in southern Africa, debunked myths about Neanderthals, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org, because members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is prehistoric hyenas and Canadian hyenas. Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 16 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows,

and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include a lot of wonderful hyena books. In particular, The Field Guide to Felids and Hyenas of the World by naturalist José R. Castelló. Also, The Social Lives of Animals by University of Sydney biology professor and program director Ashley Ward. The book How the Zebra Got Its Stripes by biologist Leo Grasset, and tons of digital resources from Lonely Planet, Fast Company,

PBS Nature, the San Diego Zoo, the Cincinnati Zoo, the Kruger National Park in South Africa, and the Gorogoro Hyena Project in Tanzania. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, the Skadagoke people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the

Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 122. That's about the topic of the letter Y. Fun fact, the letter Y in the Latin alphabet originated as an attempt to properly pronounce Greek. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more, especially off of this hyena episode. If you liked this at all, you're going to love Creature Feature. It's just right up your alley.

Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported

directly by you