The aardwolf (Proteles cristata) is a species of hyena that does not hunt large animals, but instead eats about 250,000 termites each night!

I’m sure you all think of a big, scary predator when you hear the word hyena, and for the most part this is correct. There is however more than just one species of hyena, and in this post I want to tell you a little bit about the diversity found within this family of “cat-like” animals.

An image of an aardwolf, a very interesting species of hyena! Image by Dominik Käuferle, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Let me start of by explaining why I wrote them as being “cat-like”. I know that for some reason many people think the hyenas are closely related to the dogs and wolves, but this is incorrect. They are all in the order Carnivora, just like both cats and dogs, but the hyenas are actually part of the suborder Feliformia. This suborder would literally be translated into “cat-like”, and includes animals such as mongooses, meerkats, civets, and the true cats (family Felidae) such as tigers, cats, lions and so on. There is also another suborder called Caniformia (dog-like) that include wolves, raccoons, foxes and even bears and some seal species, but not hyenas. Anyway, let’s return to the hyenas again!

The hyenas (Hyaenidae sp.) is a small taxonomic family with only four extant species. All four of these are endemic to Africa and parts of the Middle-East, and only the striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena) is found outside of Africa. Despite being evolutionary closely related to cats, the hyenas are both behaving and looking a lot more like canines than cats, which is a very good example of convergent evolution; meaning here that since there are no big canines on the African continent, another species filled this open spot in the ecosystem to exploit this untapped niche. This lead to evolve to behave a lot like wolves, since there was en ecological vacancy for this type of behavior.

A striped hyena. Image by Sumeet Moghe, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

As I said, there are only 4 living species of hyenas, but this does not mean that they are not diverse. The striped hyena are mostly scavengers, but the spotted hyenas on the other hand kill up to 95 % of their own food, leaving only a small portion of their diet for scavenging. The most remarkable species of hyena is the aardwolf (Proteles cristata), which is not killing big mammals at all!

The aardwolf is an insect eater!

The aardwolf is very different from the other three hyena species, with the biggest difference being that it does not hunt or scavenge large animals at all. Instead of a very powerful bite it got a long, sticky tongue that is perfect for eating insects, and its favorite is termites (Infraorder Isoptera). During a single night the aardwolf is able to eat about a quarter of a million termites by itself, which is obviously a huge number even considering the fact that termites are very small.

Termites; the favorite food of aardwolves! Image is Public Domain.

It only feeds during the night, while sleeping at day, so it’s very rare to see an aardwolf with your own eyes even if you visit the shrublands of eastern and southern Africa. It looks a lot like the striped hyena, and for a while scientists believed that it was simply an animal that had copied the traits of the morphology of the hyena without being a member of the hyena species itself.

Despite eating insects and larvae, the aardwolf still has its hyena teeth, and can use these for defense, as well as for fighting with other aardwolves about territory or mating, but they are not really good at fighting when they have to defend their territory against other animal species. They are very territorial, and mark their territory by extruding a black substance from their anal glands. A single territory is controlled by a monogamous pair, and potentially a few offspring that are still young enough to live with their parents.

An aardwolf up close and personal. Photo by Greg Hume, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Conservation status of the aardwolf and other hyenas

The aardwolf has a very low population density since it needs lots of termites in its territory, so you generally only find a single pair on a one square kilometer big area. Despite this the population is considered stable, and it is classified Least Concern by the IUCN. The spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) is in the same boat, and is also considered Least Concern, but sadly both the Brown hyena and the Striped hyena are having a decline in their population numbers, and are considered Near Threatened.

This means that no of the four hyena species is in immediate threat of extinction, but at this point we should keep a watchful eye on both the brown and the striped hyena to prevent further population loss.

Thanks for reading

Thank you very much for reading my posts about hyenas, and the aardwolf in particular. I hope you enjoyed it!

As for the sources of the aardwolf, a lot of is it taken from the book African Predators by Gus Millis and Martin Harvey. This is a very nice book to read if you are at all interested in the large predators of Africa. As for the other sources, the links are found spread in the post close to where the information I found from them are, so check it out to learn more!