
This Carnivore Turned Up in Egypt After Vanishing 5,000 Years Ago
The animal killed two goats belonging to residents of Wadi Yahmib, a village within the sparsely populated Elba Protected Area of Egypt. To protect their livestock, the villagers chased down the carnivore in a pickup truck and killed it.
When Abdullah Nagy, a zoologist at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, received a video of the hunt from a colleague who was in the region, he thought he was being pranked.
'I was asking, 'Where are you actually? Because that species doesn't exist in our country,'' Dr. Nagy said. ''Are you sure that you didn't cross into Sudan or something?''
Additional photos offered persuasive proof: A spotted hyena had crossed into Egypt, about 300 miles north of the nearest known population of the animals in Sudan. The observation of the hyena is the first record of the oft-misunderstood mammal in Egypt in 5,000 years.
Two other hyena species — the striped hyena and the aardwolf — can be found in Egypt. But spotted hyenas went extinct in the country millenniums ago as the regional climate became dryer and more arid. Warthogs and zebras also disappeared from Egypt at this time.
Dr. Nagy, Said El-Kholy and two other colleagues published details of the encounter in the journal Mammalia this month.
While Dr. Nagy said the hyena sighting left him in 'disbelief,' Christine Wilkinson, a carnivore ecologist and hyena specialist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the California Academy of Sciences, wasn't fazed in the slightest.
'To be honest with you, spotted hyenas cannot surprise me,' she said. 'They are just incredibly behaviorally flexible animals that can make it work in all different circumstances.'
Spotted hyenas have a reputation for being scavengers, but they actually hunt most of the food they eat themselves. They live in large, complex matriarchal societies called clans, which are similar to the social groups of some primates like baboons. Adept problem solvers, they can make do on a diet of caterpillars or prey on baby elephants, Dr. Wilkinson said.
Some even live among people, as they do in Harar, an Ethiopian city where they are fed and revered by locals.
Spotted hyenas are the largest of the four living hyena species and are found throughout sub-Saharan Africa; in regions where other big predators on the continent are struggling, the hyenas seem to be holding firm.
'What we're discovering is that the spotted hyenas are doing really quite well, probably better than the other large carnivores' like lions, leopards and cheetahs, said Andrew Jacobson, a conservation biologist at Catawba College in North Carolina.
That seemed to be reflected in Dr. Nagy and his colleagues' research. To figure out how the hyena might have made the journey into Egypt, they analyzed satellite images of the vegetation in the area. They found that the region, normally dry and forbidding, has been in a recent wet period, which has led to more plant growth and, potentially, more herbivores like gazelles for hyenas to hunt.
Dr. Jacobson, Dr. Wilkinson and other colleagues are working with the International Union for Conservation of Nature to update a spotted hyena range map. The team hopes to submit the new map for publication sometime this year, Dr. Jacobson said.
Though some spotties, as Dr. Wilkinson calls them, are doing well, others seem to be struggling. Dr. Jacobson said there are possible declines of the hyenas in parts of west and central Africa.
One of the biggest threats to the animals is conflict with humans, as the fate of the Egyptian hyena shows. When hyenas kill livestock, Dr. Wilkinson said, people often feel that they have to kill them to protect their livelihoods.
'They can't take the risk to lose their one cow or their small herd of goats to hyenas,' she added. 'It's a very complicated issue.'
Though this spottie's trip to Egypt had an abrupt end, the animal will live on, in a way, in the country. When Dr. Nagy first learned that the hyena had been killed, he asked people in Wadi Yahmib to bury it to protect it from decomposing. He hopes to travel to the village next month to collect the skeleton and bring it back to his university's museum for study.
'I wouldn't be able to dissect it, because it will be decayed,' Dr. Nagy said. 'The skeleton itself would provide very valuable insights.'

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Miami Herald
4 hours ago
- Miami Herald
Invasive bullfrogs ‘eat everything' — including turtles — at Yosemite, study says
A study has found that removing invasive bullfrogs from Yosemite National Park ponds has generated a resurgence in the population of native pond turtles, experts said. When University of California, Davis, researchers first began studying four ponds at the park, they were overwhelmed by non-native American bullfrogs, a news release said. 'At night, you could look out over the pond and see a constellation of eyes blinking back at you,' said Sidney Woodruff, a UC Davis Ph.D. candidate and lead author of the study. 'Their honking noise is iconic, and it drowns out native species' calls.' The invasive frogs had decimated the native population of northwestern pond turtles, according to the study, published in the May issue of the journal Biological Conservation. Together with the southwestern pond turtle, northwestern pond turtles are the only native freshwater turtles in California, the university said. Northwestern pond turtles have vanished from over half their range, which stretches from Baja California to Washington state. At Yosemite, the only surviving turtles in the ponds surveyed were the ones that were too big for bullfrogs to eat, the study found. American bullfrogs are native to the eastern United States but don't belong in the West. 'One reason American bullfrogs are among the top worst globally introduced pests is because they eat everything — anything that fits into their mouth,' said senior author Brian Todd, a UC Davis professor in the Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology. 'They've been causing declines to native species everywhere they're introduced, which is around the world.' The bullfrogs were introduced to Yosemite National Park in the 1950s and quickly spread throughout the park, researchers said. While their arrival was believed to be linked to the decline in pond turtles, it wasn't confirmed until the study took place, according to researchers. Between 2016 and 2022, researchers monitored four ponds at Yosemite, two with bullfrogs and two without, the study said. Turtles were 2 to 100 times more prevalent at the ponds where bullfrogs were absent, researchers said. When bullfrogs were removed from the other two ponds in 2019, researchers found juvenile pond turtles in them for the first time, the study said. 'As bullfrog presence declined, we started to hear other native frogs call and see native salamanders walking around,' Woodruff said. 'It's nice to be able to go back to these sites and hear a chorus of native frogs calling again that previously would not have been heard.' The Western Pond Turtle Range-wide Conservation Coalition, Yosemite Conservancy, U.S. Geological Survey and USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture funded the study.
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
Still Not Feeling the Same After COVID-19? You're Not Alone
Credit - Getty Images Most people have put the COVID-19 pandemic behind them. Infections, vaccinations, or a combination of both have bolstered people's immunity, and while new variants continue to pop up, getting sick does not induce the same panic it once did. But a new study shows that recovery from COVID-19 might not be as quick or straightforward as most of us now expect. The study, published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases, found that on average, it takes many people up to three months to return to good physical health after a COVID-19 infection, and nine months to recover good mental well-being. For up to 20% of infected people who were analyzed in the study, this mental-health recovery took even longer: up to a year or more. Lauren Wisk, assistant professor in the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles, and her team looked at data from people who had COVID-19 at eight health facilities across the U.S. from Dec. 2020 to Aug. 2022. People were asked to fill out surveys every three months for one year about their recovery, recording physical and mental symptoms like anxiety, depression, fatigue, social participation, sleep disturbances, and pain. It took people far longer to regain their mental well-being than it did their physical health. 'To be totally honest, we didn't necessarily expect to see different recovery trajectories as big as the ones we are seeing,' says Wisk. 'While it makes sense that some people recover faster physically, and other people recover faster mentally, on average the difference that we saw was surprising.' Read More: You Could Have Long COVID and Not Even Know It Wisk and her team also asked people to self-report if they experienced Long COVID, meaning symptoms stemming from their infection that lingered for at least three months. Nearly half of people who reported both poor physical and mental qualify of life following their infections also believed they had Long COVID. While the assessment was subjective, it tracked with the data Wisk's team collected; among people who reported just poor physical health, poor mental health, or neither, there were fewer reports of Long COVID. The findings point to the need for a deeper understanding of how COVID-19 infections affect the body, physically and mentally, in the short and long term, says Wisk. 'We need to be thinking about a longer road to recovery for people, because even if someone recovers physically from their symptoms, it might not end there for them.' Appreciating these longer lasting effects could help people seek treatment for their symptoms, which may condense their recovery period. Wisk says that short courses of anxiety medications and sleep therapies, for example, could address some of the lingering effects of COVID-19. 'We know how to treat the initial infection and how to keep people alive, but we don't have a great treatment protocol for the after effects and the lingering symptoms,' says Wisk. 'These data should help to guide development of protocols in which we think of recovery over a potentially long time horizon before people get back to normal.' Contact us at letters@


Time Magazine
9 hours ago
- Time Magazine
Still Not Feeling the Same After COVID-19? You're Not Alone
Most people have put the COVID-19 pandemic behind them. Infections, vaccinations, or a combination of both have bolstered people's immunity, and while new variants continue to pop up, getting sick does not induce the same panic it once did. But a new study shows that recovery from COVID-19 might not be as quick or straightforward as most of us now expect. The study, published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases, found that on average, it takes many people up to three months to return to good physical health after a COVID-19 infection, and nine months to recover good mental well-being. For up to 20% of infected people who were analyzed in the study, this mental-health recovery took even longer: up to a year or more. Lauren Wisk, assistant professor in the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles, and her team looked at data from people who had COVID-19 at eight health facilities across the U.S. from Dec. 2020 to Aug. 2022. People were asked to fill out surveys every three months for one year about their recovery, recording physical and mental symptoms like anxiety, depression, fatigue, social participation, sleep disturbances, and pain. It took people far longer to regain their mental well-being than it did their physical health. 'To be totally honest, we didn't necessarily expect to see different recovery trajectories as big as the ones we are seeing,' says Wisk. 'While it makes sense that some people recover faster physically, and other people recover faster mentally, on average the difference that we saw was surprising.' Wisk and her team also asked people to self-report if they experienced Long COVID, meaning symptoms stemming from their infection that lingered for at least three months. Nearly half of people who reported both poor physical and mental qualify of life following their infections also believed they had Long COVID. While the assessment was subjective, it tracked with the data Wisk's team collected; among people who reported just poor physical health, poor mental health, or neither, there were fewer reports of Long COVID. The findings point to the need for a deeper understanding of how COVID-19 infections affect the body, physically and mentally, in the short and long term, says Wisk. 'We need to be thinking about a longer road to recovery for people, because even if someone recovers physically from their symptoms, it might not end there for them.' Appreciating these longer lasting effects could help people seek treatment for their symptoms, which may condense their recovery period. Wisk says that short courses of anxiety medications and sleep therapies, for example, could address some of the lingering effects of COVID-19. 'We know how to treat the initial infection and how to keep people alive, but we don't have a great treatment protocol for the after effects and the lingering symptoms,' says Wisk. 'These data should help to guide development of protocols in which we think of recovery over a potentially long time horizon before people get back to normal.'