Behavioral Ecology Blog

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 BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA–The foggy, eucalyptus-studded hills above the San Francisco Bay are a world away from the African savanna, but the spotted hyenas that live here seem content. On a recent afternoon, they excitedly jostled one another to get a better look–and sniff–at some visitors passing by their enclosure at the Field Station for the Study of Behavior, Ecology, and Reproduction at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. Pink tongues darted through the chainlink fence to lick a keeper’s outstretched hand. “These animals really get to you,” she says. “It doesn’t take long for your heart to be stolen.”

Long maligned in myths and movies as dangerous freeloaders with a high-pitched giggle, spotted hyenas are in fact intelligent animals with fascinating biology and behavior, says Stephen Glickman, a psychologist and integrative biologist at UC Berkeley and director of the field station, home to the only captive hyena research colony in the world. Since establishing the colony in 1985, Glickman has worked hard to repair the reputation of his charges and to attract the interest of other scientists.

Many have been hooked by the unique reproductive anatomy of the female spotted hyena: She sports an elongated clitoris roughly the size of the male’s penis, through which she urinates, mates, and gives birth. Why this structure evolved, how it develops in the embryo, and what it might have to do with the female’s dominant status in hyena society are among the questions that intrigue biologists. The animals also have digestive and immune systems that enable them to swallow chunks of bone that would give a lion indigestion and to feast on rotted, anthrax-ridden carcasses with no ill effects.

Other researchers say that by virtue of his enthusiasm and easygoing manner, Glickman has created a remarkably diverse network of scientists who use the hyena colony to pursue such questions. “You’ve got a dozen or more senior investigators across the entire range of biological sciences collaborating without any kind of formal arrangement,” says Elihu Gerson, an independent San Francisco-based sociologist who is studying the dynamics of the collaboration. “It’s extraordinarily unusual.”

But that collaboration now faces an uncertain future. Last fall, the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which funded the colony for 22 years through an R01 grant to Glickman, did not renew his grant. Despite positive comments about the project’s recent work, the priority score was too low. “The basic problem is that there’s no precedent I know of for a research grant with the number of collaborators we have and the variety of projects,” Glickman says. An emergency $200,000 grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) will keep the colony going for another 15 to 18 months while he and colleagues look for a longer term solution. Meanwhile, he’s had to downsize the colony by about a third, arranging for 10 hyenas to be sent to zoos and animal parks and euthanizing two older animals.

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