Berlin, 21 January 2024

A spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) has been found in South Eastern Egypt: the first recorded instance of the creature in this region for thousands of years.

The lone individual was caught and killed by people around 30km from the border with Sudan, a paper in De Gruyter’s Mammalia reports.

“My first reaction was disbelief until I checked the photos and videos of the remains,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Adbullah Nagy from Al-Azhar University, Egypt. “Seeing the evidence, I was completely taken aback. It was beyond anything we had expected to find in Egypt.”

The sighting took place some 500km north of the known range of spotted hyena in neighbouring Sudan. The researchers theorized that a regional, decadal weather cycle, part of the Active Red Sea Trough phenomenon, could have resulted in increased rainfall and plant growth, opening up a migration corridor for the hyena where better grazing opportunities supported sufficient prey.

To test this idea, they used a normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) as a measure of precipitation and corresponding pastoral grazing opportunity, with NDVI values obtained from Landsat 5 and 7 satellite images between 1984 and 2022. Analysis revealed multi-year droughts with shorter relatively wet periods. The last five years had higher NVDI values than the previous two decades, suggesting increased plant growth could support prey for a curious spotted hyena on the move.

“The fact that the corridor area has become less environmentally harsh, offering easier passage along ‘the highway’, may explain how the hyena reached this far north,” says Nagy. “However, the motivation for its extensive journey into Egypt is still a mystery that demands further research.”

Spotted hyenas are successful pack predators, usually found in a variety of habitats in sub-Saharan Africa. They can travel up to 27km in a day, shadowing semi-nomadic, human-managed livestock migrations and subsisting on occasional kills.

The individual described in this study killed two goats herded by people in Wadi Yahmib in the Elba Protected Area, and was subsequently tracked, spotted, chased and killed in late February 2024. The kill was photographed and geolocated, giving animal ecologists the opportunity to follow up the sighting.

The study’s findings force a rethink of the agreed distribution of spotted hyenas and add to the available data on how regional climate change can affect animal migration.

The paper can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1515/mammalia-2024-0031