Head to head
Aardwolf vs Spotted Hyena
The aardwolf is a hyena. It belongs to the same small family, Hyaenidae, as the spotted, brown, and striped hyenas, and it has the sloping back and the general shape of one. But somewhere in its history it stopped eating meat and specialised, more completely than almost any other carnivore, on a single kind of insect. The spotted hyena went the other way, becoming the most powerful mammalian predator and bone processor of the African plains.
| Aardwolf | Spotted Hyena | |
|---|---|---|
| Which hyena | The smallest of the four hyena species | The largest of the four hyena species |
| Weight | About 8 to 10 kg | About 45 to 80 kg |
| Diet | Termites, almost exclusively | Mostly hunted prey; also scavenges |
| Teeth | Reduced to small pegs; jaws barely used | Massive, with bone-cracking premolars |
| Bite | Weak; not needed | Among the strongest of any land mammal |
| Social structure | Solitary forager; monogamous pair on a territory | Matriarchal clans of up to about 80 |
| Danger to people | None; harmless and shy | Occasionally dangerous, especially to sleepers in the open |
| Conservation | Least Concern | Least Concern but declining outside protected areas |
Aardwolf vs Hyena: common questions
Is the aardwolf really a hyena?
Yes, taxonomically it is one of only four living species in the hyena family, Hyaenidae, along with the spotted, brown, and striped hyenas. It is the earliest-branching of the four and has kept some features the others lost, but it is unambiguously a hyena and not, as the name might suggest, a kind of wolf or a relative of the aardvark. "Aardwolf" is Afrikaans for "earth wolf", a reference to its burrow-dwelling habit and superficially dog-like look. Its termite specialisation is the odd part, not its family.
Do hyenas only scavenge?
No, and the spotted hyena in particular is a serious hunter. Long-term studies in the Serengeti, Ngorongoro, and elsewhere have found that spotted hyenas kill the majority of what they eat, running down wildebeest, zebra, and gazelle in stamina chases, often at night, and that lions frequently scavenge from hyenas rather than the reverse. The scavenging reputation comes from the hyena's genuine skill at finding and consuming carcasses, including the bones, and from colonial-era observers who saw them at kills and assumed they had not made them. The brown and striped hyenas are more scavenger-oriented; the aardwolf hunts only insects.
Why did the aardwolf give up meat?
The likely answer is that termites are an abundant, predictable, and largely uncontested food source in African grassland, and an animal that could exploit them efficiently had a niche with little competition. The aardwolf specialises on a few species of Trinervitermes and similar harvester termites that forage on the surface at night, licking them from the ground rather than digging, and it can tolerate the soldiers' chemical defences. Over time, the parts of the body it no longer used, the shearing teeth, the heavy jaw muscles, the hunting behaviour, were reduced or lost, while its tongue, saliva glands, and sense of hearing became specialised for finding and gathering insects.