The animal killed two goats belonging to the residents of Wadi Yahmib, a village inside the poorly populated area protected by Elba in Egypt. To protect their cattle, the village inhabitants chased the carnivorous in a pickup truck and killed him.
When Abdullah Nagy, a zoologist from the University of Al-Azhar al Cairo, received a video of hunting from a colleague who was in the region, thought he was joked.
“I was asking: ‘Where are you actually? Because that species does not exist in our country, “said Dr. Nagy.” “Are you sure you haven’t crossed Sudan or something?” “
Further photos offered persuasive evidence: a stained hyena had crossed Egypt, about 300 miles north of the closest population of the animals in Sudan. The observation of the hyena is the first record of the mammal often insufficient in Egypt in 5000 years.
Two other species of hyena – the hyena in stripes and the aardwolf – can be found in Egypt. But the stained hyenas died out in the country millennia ago when the regional climate became drier and more arid. Even the waves and zebras have disappeared from Egypt right now.
Dr. Nagy said that El-Kholy and two other colleagues published the details of the meeting in the Mammalia magazine this month.
While Dr. Nagy said that Hyena’s sighting left him in “disbelief”, Christine Wilkinson, carnivorous ecologist and hyena specialist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the California Academy of Sciences, is not was slightly nuanced.
“To be honest with you, the identified hyenas cannot surprise me,” he said. “They are incredibly behaviorally flexible animals that can make it work in all different circumstances.”
The stained hyenas have the reputation of being brushes, but in reality they hunt most of the food they eat alone. They live in large and complex matriarchal societies called clan, which are similar to the social groups of some primates such as baboons. Adept problem solvers, they can make a caterpillar diet or prey on children’s elephants, said dr. Wilkinson.
Some live even among people, as they do to Harar, an Ethiopian city in which they are nourished and venerated by the premises.
The iene spots are the greatest of the four species of living hyena and are found throughout sub-Saharan Africa; In the regions in which other great predators on the continent are struggling, the hyenas seem to keep them still.
“What we are discovering is that the Maculed Hyenas are really going quite well, probably better than the other great carnivores” such as Leoni, Leopardi and Ghetardi, said Andrew Jacobson, a biologist of the catowba college conservation in the North Carolina.
It seemed that he reflected in the search for Dr. Nagy and his colleagues. To understand how the hyena could have made the trip to Egypt, they analyzed the satellite images of the vegetation in the area. They discovered that the region, normally dry and forbidden, was in a recent humid period, which led to greater growth in plants and, potentially, more herbivores such as the hunting gazelles.
Dr. Jacobson, Dr. Wilkinson and other colleagues are working with the International Union for Conservation of Nature to update a stained hyena range map. The team hopes to present the new map for publication this year, said dr. Jacobson.
Although some spots, as Dr. Wilkinson call them, are going well, others seem to fight. Dr. Jacobson said that there are possible drop in hyenas in some parts of West and central Africa.
One of the greatest threats to animals is the conflict with humans, as the fate of the Egyptian hyena shows. When the hyenas kill cattle, Dr. Wilkinson said, people often feel they need to kill them to protect their means of subsistence.
“They cannot run the risk of losing their only cow or their small herd of goats in the hyenas,” he added. “It’s a very complicated problem.”
Although this journey of spots to Egypt has had a brusque end, the animal will live, in a certain sense, in the country. When Dr. Nagy came for the first time that the hyena had been killed, he asked the people of Wadi Yahmib to bury him to protect him from decomposition. He hopes to go to the village next month to collect the skeleton and bring him back to the museum of his university for the study.
“I would not be able to analyze it, because it will be fallen,” said dr. NAGY. “The skeleton itself would provide very precious intuitions.”