This is my final column and I’ve loved introducing you to the extraordinary diversity of the female experience. But I have saved the most badass till last: the spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta).
Few animals have been more misunderstood than the hyena – historically described as a cowardly, grave-robbing brute, of indeterminable sexuality. According to Pliny the Elder, the Roman author of the world’s first animal encyclopedia, the hyena is “male during one year, and a female the next”.
Pliny’s sexual mythologising is a result of the female hyena’s unconventional genitalia – a near-perfect facsimile of the male’s. The Crocuta’s clitoris extends 17cm and is shaped and positioned exactly like a penis. She even gets erections, which form an integral part of her greeting displays. Females also sport a false scrotum, where the labia have fused and filled with fatty tissue. One anatomist declared males and females so similar that sex could only be determined by “palpation of the scrotum” – a rather foolhardy practice on an animal famous for its bone-crunching bite. I’d rather hazard a guess.
With no external vaginal opening, female hyenas must urinate, copulate and give birth through their multi-tasking ‘pseudo-penis’. None of this is easy. Sex requires the male to penetrate a flaccid clitoris – a bit like trying to have sex with a sock. Birth is even more treacherous, like squeezing a cantaloupe melon out of a hosepipe. Fatalities, involving cub or mum, are not uncommon.
It is easy to see how the sight of a ‘male’ hyena giving birth through his penis led to the hermaphrodite myth. But it’s less clear why the hyena’s pudendum would take such a peculiar evolutionary path. We do know that spotted hyenas are highly intelligent animals, living in complex clan structures where females rule the roost. Their social system is matriarchal and extremely cooperative, with females working together to hunt and raise their young. But they are not just scavengers. They are exceptional predators, too, responsible for hunting 95 per cent of their food. They use teamwork, patience and intelligence to bring down prey much larger than themselves – such as water buffalo – by working in unison. Studies have even shown that lions scavenge more kills from hyenas than vice-versa.
Hyenas outperform other social animals, including chimpanzees, in cooperative problem-solving tasks. They can even count. Their intelligence allows them to outwit and outmanoeuvre rivals, and they use their superior communication skills to coordinate group activities, from hunting to defending territory. But perhaps the most fascinating – and often overlooked – aspect of the hyena is its relationship with humans. Early hominins shared the African savannah with hyenas, and it’s likely that our lumbering bipedal ancestors were at constant risk of being preyed upon by these clever carnivores.
Our ancestors had only very basic stone tools and were probably scavenging more than hunting. They would not have been able to fight off a pack of hungry hyenas to protect their prize meal. This is a theory borne out by animal bones from the period that show cut marks from early stone tools mixed with the tooth marks of hyenas, suggesting that hyenas were laughing at us and stealing our dinner for as much as 2.5 million years. No wonder we don’t like them.
I hope my columns have helped you appreciate females beyond their stereotype. I’m taking leave to finish my book about the diversity of male animals, who also need rescuing from limiting toxic labels.
Read more of Lucy's columns
- “They parasitise their sexually reproducing cousins’ sperm for their own purposes”: Meet the self-replicating sisterhood
- Kick-ass female zebra saves foal from infanticidal male
- Nature’s most devoted mother starves herself for an epic 4 years – so her babies get the best start – with devastating consequences
- It hasn’t had sex in 80 million years and extracts DNA from what it eats – meet this indestructible ‘Frankenstein’ creature
Top image: close up of a spotted hyena in South Africa. Credit: Getty