Many killers work alone. Others work in teams, mobs, troops, flocks, gangs, pods or shoals. Here’s our pick of the packs that strike terror into the hearts of their prey…
10 deadliest killing teams on the planet
Wolf
Among large carnivorous mammals, cooperative hunting is hardly unusual. Lion prides work together to bring down buffalo and zebra, while clans of spotted hyenas can overwhelm prey many times their size. But the archetypal pack hunter is surely the grey wolf.
Wolves live and hunt in tightly bonded family groups of up to about 12 individuals. When they locate a herd of elk, bison or caribou, they harry the animals until one shows a sign of weakness and then isolate it from the group and chase it down.
But more wolves do not automatically mean more successful hunts. Studies of wild packs show that typically just three or four individuals do the bulk of the work, while each additional mouth means the carcass must be divided more thinly.
- The 10 deadliest dogs on Earth: Discover the world's most ferocious and savage wild canine hunters
- 10 deadliest apex predators in the wild: which ruthless mammals are the best – and most brutal – killing machines?
Pack size is about more than just hunting. While some adults hunt, others guard the den or tend dependent pups. It takes a pack to raise a wolf cub.
Harris’s hawk
Raptors - hawks, eagles, falcons and owls - almost always hunt alone. Harris’s hawks, which ply their trade in the deserts and scrublands of the Americas, work in groups of up to six.
A hunting day starts at dawn when the team assembles on a perch before heading off to scour their territory for rabbits. Once a target is identified, they have a few options. They might attack simultaneously from different angles or employ a relay system, taking it in turns to chase the prey until it’s exhausted. Should the prey take cover in the undergrowth, one or two hawks move in to flush it out while the others wait to pounce when it flees.
The bigger the team, the more prey the birds catch. A study in New Mexico found that groups of six birds catch twice as many rabbits as groups of four.
After a successful hunt the spoils are divided according to rank, with the dominant female usually feeding first.
Atlantic sailfish
They are among the fastest fish in the sea and one of the most distinctive, bearing a long beak, or rostrum, which they slash through shoals of smaller prey fish to stun and kill them.
Atlantic sailfish are among the few fish to hunt cooperatively, working together to herd shoals into a tight swirling mass and then taking turns to attack
There is also evidence that individual sailfish adopt specialised roles within the hunting party. While some slash their bills to the left, others slash to the right, which might give the prey fish less chance to evade an attack.
Driver ant
What driver ants lack in size they make up for in sheer weight of numbers. A single colony may contain more than a million workers, and when they go hunting, the forest floor itself seems to come alive.
- Ants guide: what ant supercolonies are, how long ants live and just why they get stuck in a death spiral
- This innocent-looking insect delivers the most painful sting in the world and can leave you in agony for 24 hours or more
These expeditions are driven by the colony’s constant demand for protein. As a nomadic species, they cannot maintain long-term food reserves and must hunt almost continuously. At the business end of these raiding parties are the soldiers, bearing enormous heads armed with long, scissor-like mandibles capable of dismantling prey piece by piece.
Their prey range is extraordinarily broad. Swarms easily overwhelm other invertebrates, but will also attack frogs, lizards, birds, and occasionally small mammals, especially if they are trapped or injured. They can even pose a danger to vulnerable humans. One documented incident describes a Ugandan man who fell asleep under a bush and was overwhelmed by a swarm, sustaining thousands of bites that triggered shock and left him comatose before he was rescued .
Myxobacteria
Some pack-hunting predators are invisible to the naked eye. Myxobacteria are soil-dwelling microbes that, individually, look much like any other rod-shaped bacterium. Collectively, though, they behave like microscopic wolf packs, hunting in coordinated swarms.
Keeping in contact by means of chemical signals, the cells glide across surfaces en masse, seeking out colonies of bacteria and fungi and engulfing them in a cocktail of digestive enzymes.
When food becomes scarce, they switch strategies, coalescing into elaborate mushroom-like fruiting bodies that contain spores capable of riding out the famine.
The result is a level of organisation between countless simple cells that makes the swarm behave uncannily like a single organism with a mind of its own.
Social spider
Arachnophobes beware. Because if a spider is enough to get you sweating, you probably don’t want to be dealing with webs full of thousands of them.
Anelosimus eximius is one of just a handful of spider species to have abandoned a solitary life. Instead, these spiders live in dense colonies, spinning vast three-dimensional webs that can envelop entire bushes.
- Arachnophobes look away now as here are the weirdest spiders in the world – including one that has a taste for human blood…
- It stretches 106 square metres and spans two countries – and it's home to over one hundred thousand scuttling residents
When prey strikes the web, the response is immediate and overwhelming. Dozens of spiders scurry out to bite the victim and wrap it in layers of silk. As individuals, they are not particularly formidable, but together they can subdue prey much bigger than themselves - even small birds and other vertebrates.
The payoff is clear: bigger webs, bigger meals and shared effort. But sociability comes with strings attached. Colonies become highly inbred and vulnerable to infectious diseases, and can collapse suddenly if conditions shift — perhaps explaining why sociality is so rare among spiders.
Cuban boa
On the whole, snakes are an unsociable bunch, coming together only to court and mate. Cuban boas, though, are party animals.
Their social gathering of choice is a hunting party. These hefty constrictors have a taste for bats, which they target as they leave their roosting caves at dusk. The snakes take up positions
around the cave entrances, clinging to the walls and ceilings and striking out at the bats as they fly past.
In 2017, researchers discovered https://www.animalbehaviorandcognition.org/uploads/journals/14/02 Feb2017 Dinets_HH(7)_final.pdf that the boas gather in groups and then space themselves out evenly around the entrance so that their hanging bodies form a barrier that blocks the flight path of their prey, making them easier to catch. The result is that snakes in a hunting party achieve a greater success rate than those hunting alone.
African wild dog
The exquisite patchwork of ochre, black, and white on the coats of African wild dogs is at odds with the brutality of their hunting methods.
Packs, often 10–20 strong, spread across the savanna in loose formation, communicating with high-pitched contact calls before locking on to a target. Then it becomes a test of endurance.
African wild dogs are among the most persistent of all pursuit predators, capable of prolonged high-speed chases, at speeds approaching 60kph. While some individuals nip relentlessly at the target’s hindquarters, others forge ahead to intercept it. Success rates can exceed 70 per cent in some populations, which is remarkably high for a large carnivore. Only 20 per cent of wolf hunts are successful.
The kill itself can be harrowing. There is no fatal choke-hold or skull-crushing bite. Instead, prey is disembowelled and rapidly consumed, often while still conscious. An impala may be reduced to little more than skin and bone within 20 minutes.
Volta’s electric eel
You might expect a fish capable of stunning prey from a distance with powerful bursts of electricity to have rather few close friends. And indeed, Volta’s electric eels do tend to work alone. Their usual method is to locate concealed fish using weak pulses of electricity that cause prey to twitch involuntarily, revealing their position, and then knock them out with a much stronger discharge.
But the eels are not entirely anti-social. In 2021, biologists discovered that they sometimes gather in groups of more than a hundred to herd shoals of smaller fish into a tight ball before zapping them in a simultaneous barrage of electricity.
The technique kills lots of fish quickly and may require less effort than hunting alone. Generating high-voltage discharges saps a lot of energy, but in a group attack the burden is shared: only some eels deliver the main shock while others dart in to pick off the stunned prey. It’s not yet known how the eels guard against free-riders who reap the benefits without doing any of the work - a problem that many cooperative hunters have to deal with.
Orca
Equipped with both brains and brawn, the world’s biggest dolphins are always going to be a formidable force when they put their heads together.
Orca pods tailor their tactics according to their prey. They can herd fish into tight bait balls, chase down larger prey over long distances by working in relay, and separate whale calves from their mothers.
- 11 jaw-dropping killer whale moments captured in photos and film that reveal the brutal hunting techniques of the ocean’s top predator
- Ocean's most powerful, ruthless killers: The world's top 9 marine predators that rule the waves
Even a seal that has taken refuge on an ice floe isn't safe. By lining up and swimming at the target in unison, orcas create waves that can break up the ice or wash the prey into the water.
These strategies are the product of learning and tradition as much as instinct - accumulated knowledge passed down through generations.
