Spotted hyena found in Egypt for the first time in 5k years | Hacker News Reader

Spotted hyena found in Egypt for the first time in 5k years

phys.org

97 pointswglb54 comments

The title is clickbait. There are have not been any known confirmed spottings, but, according to the article: "However, Hofer and Mills (1998), mentioned unconfirmed records from Egypt through questionnaire surveys."

I would think that 5K is a long time for any event to occur, however unlikely. The fact that there was no confirmed spotting doesn't mean all that much to me, especially if you look back all the way into ancient history where certainly not every animal sighting was recorded.

> There are have not been any known confirmed spottings

from the OP:

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

My first reaction was disbelief until I checked the photos and videos of the remains," said the study's lead author, Dr. Abdullah 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."

I believe the nit misja111 was picking was that just because this was the first confirmed sighting doesn't mean other ones weren't found there in the past 5K years by people who didn't report them.

We know from fossil evidence that spotted hyenas used to live in egypt but died out there about 5000 years ago. The striped hyena remained.

This was not some improbable random event that took 5000 years to be observed. Climate change recently created a new corridor of acceptable conditions that allowed a hyena from a distant region to migrate.

Paper: https://doi.org/10.1515/mammalia-2024-0031

Dumb question, but how do they know it's not an escaped (or abandoned) pet? There are sadly many exotic pets on display on social media, particularly in this area of the world.

Why'd they have to kill it?

Because it was hunting their livestock.

Bigger predators and sheep/goats/etc don't mix well in general (should not be a surprise).

Protecting the rights of bigger predators over those of shepherds/farmers is something that rich nations can afford, but it still meets a lot of popular opposition (=> see wolves/brown bears in central Europe). An economically weaker nation like Egypt can not justify a move like that, especially if the animal in question is useless for tourism, too.

Don't worry too much tough, spotted Hyenas are not threatened.

Or wolves in Yellowstone. Or grizzlies in Washington.

Everybody loves the idea of reintroducing wildlife. Nobody likes the idea of releasing a grizzly bear within 500 miles of their house.

That's fair. Thanks for the explanation.

The earth was actually cooling starting about 5000 years ago until whenever carbon emissions started having their effect ~100 years ago. Between 5,000 and 11,000 years ago the Sahara was green. I wonder if this is a little taste of what's to come.

There where warm periods, called intra-glacials in the bronze age, the late Roman, and the middle-ages.

The Sahara is on a regular-ish cycle going from green to desert about every 30k years. It's had multiple green eras. The last one is called the African humid period

any idea why so?

Briefly: earth‘s rotational axis had a different tilt, leading to completely different climate and weather systems behavior. Incidentally, before the green sahara period, the sahara was much larger than today.

i've read the axis precesses completing a cycle every 24,000 years, so the fraction of ocean vs land in direct sun gradually and continually changes accordingly.

There are many higher order gravitational effects which alter earths orbit and axial tilt and therefore both yearlong and seasonal solar radiation patterns.

One of these is a cyclical pattern of tens of thousands of years that caused warming and cooling somewhat less that a degree. For about six thousand years earth was half a degree warmer and weather patterns in the Sahara were different. Then there was some cooling until modern CO2 issues.

In the early twentieth century there were some very real concerns about long term climate cooling as climate science was being developed but instead greenhouse gases have blasted us very far and very fast in the other direction.

Any idea, how does the dirt/each return over time to sustain plant life? Or is it just a gradual grow inwards with plant matter slowly forming topsoil?

The Amazon rainforest's soil is extremely poor in nutrients and very shallow due to all the rain. In addition, at least 50% of the rain it gets comes from the trees themselves. The division between abiotic and biotic factors is a lot more fuzzy than people realize

The Sahara's sand is actually full of a lot of nutrients. In fact the massive Saharan sandstorms that traverse the Atlantic Ocean are a significant source of fertilizer for the Amazon rainforest

All the elements are there. You just need the right weather and plant life to get things going.

Of course we can't ignore the human element. Archeological evidence suggests humans played a massive role in transitioning the Amazon Rainforest from the grassland it once was to the jungle it now is. Reforestation projects, Great Green Wall, half-moon berm projects, etc are all way way more effective than they were just a few years ago. We're learning a lot about how much humans can do to revitalize soils

Pioneer species that can grow on basically nothing are slowly replaced by other species as the ground builds up organic matter. Fungi play a very large part in building soil as well as big and small animals.

you have it backwards. the sahara was green because the world in general was cooler back then, so the equator had weather more appropriate for the tropics. the world has gotten hotter since then, turning the region into a desert.

It's probably not so much that the world was cooler, but that it had more equable temperature. Remember Greenland was green once.

Greenland was probably once green, but we're talking several 100000 years ago, well before any humans(that we know of) appeared there.

The origin of the name is actually that Eric the Red called it that to attract settlers there. Just marketing, really.

This is just not correct.

There’s a 10,000 year period from the exit of the last ice age to about the year 0 where global temperatures were at least as warm as the 1960-1990 average. For a maybe 6000 year period within that global temperatures were about a half a degree or a little less warmer than that 1960-1990 average.

You’re just wrong. Before greenhouse gas emissions took control there’s a well recognized pattern of slow global cooling over a few thousand years.

Look at the graph https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/what’s-hott...

And then it was killed. FFS

sigh, for real..

It's listed as of "least concern". This one was just unusually far North.

I wanted to think you were joking, but no, you were not. What a horrible state of affairs.

> Spotted hyenas are successful pack predators, usually found in a variety of habitats in sub-Saharan Africa. They can travel up to 27 km 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.

My first reaction was the same - then I read this and I don’t hold it against the people anymore.

...for the FIRST TIME in 5k...

Article title: "Spotted hyena found in Egypt for the FIRST TIME in 5,000 years"

Indeed, I can't imagine these will still be around in Egypt in 5000 years time as the HN post title currently suggests.

Tens of thousands of years ago, spotted hyenas also lived in Europe, not only in Africa (like also lions, cheetahs, elephants, rhinoceroses and so on).

Their current territory is very restricted in comparison with the past.

"Spotted hyena found in Egypt for the FIRST TIME in 5,000 years then killed"

seems like there are lots of stories like this. X creature, not seen in ages found again.

Could it be genetic engineering. Some prankster billionaires scientist wanting to repopulate the world?

Or are we just getting better at finding them with more tools. (better camera traps, drones, data mining tools with AI?)

I'm curious, does anyone know? Is my billionaire prankster concept plausible? or totally implausible?

Hyenas are found all over Kenya and Tanzania, not incredibly far away. So this may be some soft of climate change thing rather than Elon trolling us.

Depends on the particular instance. Better tools help in situations where the creature has not been seen at all in decades, as well as in situations like this where it's likely that environmental changes provided an incentive for a small number of otherwise non-extinct predators to follow their prey northward. This is a different degree of what's likely happening in central Canada, which is that elusive cougars have recently been trapped alive for the first time, appearing to occasionally migrate north from the U.S, and Grizzlies have been establishing populations near the subarctic.

Per the article, this is just the first recorded observation as far North as Egypt in modern times.

The only provable thing is that it was recorded, with someones phone, and then the pictures got shared. Prior to phones bieng everywhere, like last tuesday, in the area where the hyena was killed, it would happen , and never be reported outside a tiny number of people. What would be more interesting is interviewing locals in areas like this about the flora a fauna they are co-existing with. Look at the "discovery" of the ultra giant isopds that were found in sea food markets, one now named after darth vader, not kidding.Those folks went strait from catching these things from the bottom of the ocean, to eating them, no photos and social media, just grab grandmas recipie book, and try something lkely. The conection between both of these instances, is that the discussion talks over and past the actual people physicaly involved. I think that if it was practice to include and name in published papers, those non acedemic people who are there ,on the scene as it were, we would 1 have more people likely to step up and show what they know, and 2 have more entertaining information included in scientific papers, lending them more, not less credibility, and perhaps something more important in todays world,authenticity.

Hence why I wrote "first recorded observation".

The point being that this isn't about an animal we haven't seen recently, and so the speculations of the person I responded to about genetic engineering and the like are unwarranted.

> Is my billionaire prankster concept plausible? or totally implausible?

Totally implausible.

You underestimate how large the Earth is, and how little of it is intensely observed.

IIRC when you learn theory for your driver's license in Sweden, the book says "at dusk you pass an animal on the edge of the road roughly every minute". How many of those do you actually see?

Could be a Chinese lab experiment too

fix the title: "hyena has been spotted for the first time in.." I better keep my day job too.

Title is correct: Spotted hyena is the species of hyena that was spotted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotted_hyena

Biologists have conjectured the existence of a competing species of unspotted hyenas, but none have ever been ... spotted

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyena:

“The four extant species are the striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena), the brown hyena (Parahyaena brunnea), the spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta), and the aardwolf (Proteles cristata)”

of those four, only Crocuta crocuta has ever been spotted

Does anyone still need more proofs that climate change is good and benefits living beings?

Interpreting disruption as a blanket "good" is a whole ass opinion.

What fascinates me is that serious scientists are surprised that life is random anfinds a way... "However, the motivation for its extensive journey into Egypt is still a mystery that demands further research." Like, food?

They've spent lifetimes observing these animals. I wonder what they know that you and I don't.

I am not saying i know more. But green pasture opened up, animals went there.

You must feel like an expert in so many fields if you trust your uninformed assumptions of them!

Animals animal.

Let's say you are a detective investigating a murder for hire.

Why did the hitman kill this person?

If you stop your questioning at "Because he was paid, duh" you're a really crappy detective.

A good detective would then ask "Okay but why was he paid to kill this person?"

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