Lion King Lied. We Had the Lion-Hyena Rivalry Backwards. It’s the Male Lions Who Are Looking for Trouble

GPS collars reveal hyenas retreating while male lions repeatedly close the distance.

Popular culture has not been kind to hyenas. They are often cast as skulking opportunists, lurking around the edges while the more “noble” lion does the “real” hunting, then rushing in to steal whatever they can.

That image is not entirely made up. Spotted hyenas do scavenge from lion kills. But Nancy Barker, a zoologist and movement ecologist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal whose doctoral research focused on lions and hyenas in southern Africa, kept seeing something that did not fit the familiar script.

During months of fieldwork in Namibia and Botswana, she repeatedly watched male lions appear to track hyenas through the bush.

“When I shared my observations with other leading researchers, I was often told that I had the relationship backwards: that hyenas are the ones tracking lions, primarily for scavenging opportunities, and that what I had seen was simply a series of chance encounters,” Barker said in a statement.

Years of GPS tracking now suggest those encounters were not so random after all.

In a new study, Barker and her colleagues tracked 17 lions and 14 spotted hyenas in Etosha National Park in Namibia and the Chobe-Linyanti system in Botswana. The clearest pattern ran in one direction: hyenas tended to move away from lions. Male lions, meanwhile, showed a tendency to move toward hyenas.

That does not mean every lion pursues every hyena it detects. The hyena retreat is the study’s strongest result; the male-lion signal comes from a much smaller sample and did not reach the conventional threshold for a population-wide sex effect. But the findings change the picture of a famous rivalry. The power struggle appears to unfold over kilometers, in countless decisions about who closes the gap and who gives way.

Who is Following Whom?

Hyenas really do exploit lion kills. Barker told ZME Science that she watched hyenas successfully take food from female lions in both study areas. But attraction to a carcass is not attraction to a lion.

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“Lions injure and kill hyenas, and a hyena’s protection at a carcass comes from numbers: a lone hyena has no leverage against a lion at close range,” Barker told ZME Science. “So a hyena can be attracted to an area where lions have made a kill and still back away when a lion closes the distance.”

The caution is well warranted. Previously, a 2005 study in Etosha reported that lions accounted for 71% of observed hyena mortality during the study period; male lions killed four cubs and an adult female. A later study of hyena mobbing found that, around food, hyenas mobbed lions more often when males were absent—oh, my!

Barker’s team could see a subtler version of this dynamic. The collars recorded locations every five minutes during peak activity around dusk and dawn. For each simultaneous pair of fixes, the researchers wanted to know whether each animal was moving toward the other, away from it, or roughly sideways.

At distances up to five kilometers, all nine lion-hyena pairings with usable data tilted toward hyena retreat. The same broad signal held up when the researchers used different statistical approaches.

The lion side of the story was less clear-cut. When the researchers looked at all lions together, they found no consistent tendency to move toward hyenas. But in each of the three lion-hyena pairings that involved a male lion, the male moved toward the hyena more often than away. Those three pairings came from just two individual males, however, so the pattern is suggestive rather than enough to conclude that male lions generally behave this way.

“The honest answer is that the collars tell us what animals did, not why they did it,” Barker noted. “A lion may be investigating hyena activity as a cue: hyenas advertise kills, so following them can lead to food a lion can take over; or asserting dominance over a competitor, and lions do sometimes kill hyenas outright.”

She would like to follow up with paired behavioral observations during those approaches to determine what actually motivates the lions.

Enough Collars Talking at Once

Extracting these hidden interactions from GPS traces took years of fieldwork before the statistics could even begin. Barker first spent months learning the prides and clans, identifying individuals and choosing animals unlikely to leave their group’s territory. She favored females and higher-ranking animals, then worked with veterinarians to immobilize and collar them.

“Patience, patience, and more patience,” Barker explained. “It took months of pre-collaring observation to learn the prides and clans and identify the right individuals for collaring.”

Then came fitting the collars. Barker recalled tranquilizing one lion among 14 gathered around a carcass, only for the animal to fall asleep directly on top of it. Hyenas posed their own problems: one alpha female repeatedly positioned other clan members between herself and the bait. The team ultimately immobilized 33 animals, taking measurements, photographs, and biological samples before fitting the collars.

But Barker said the real difficulty came afterward.

“The hardest part of this study wasn’t collaring or tracking one animal; it was keeping enough collars running AT THE SAME TIME in OVERLAPPING areas,” she said. “Every collar failure shrinks the dataset, and I lost several collars in Botswana because of a lack of available veterinarians to immobilize the animals to retrieve the collars.”

“I also lost several of my collared animals both in Namibia and Botswana to poaching, which was both a scientific loss and a personal one, since I knew these animals as individuals,” Barker added.

The surviving collars revealed far more than the rivalry. They could effectively reconstruct courtship. At intermediate distances, male lions tended to close in while females moved away, before the pattern reversed at very close range. They also exposed surprisingly strict boundaries among hyenas. Collared animals from different clans never registered within a kilometer of one another, even though Barker sometimes watched rival clans use the same carcass within minutes of each other.

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In Etosha, the picture was different. Barker said the rare close encounters she observed between hyenas from different clans tended to end in mutual wariness and retreat, rather than the brief carcass-sharing she sometimes saw in Chobe-Linyanti. To her, the contrast suggested that even within the same species, local conditions can shape very different social rules.

Behind the Scenes

Previously, a 2025 Journal of Zoology study found that spotted hyenas did not broadly avoid habitat because lions used it. Barker’s study suggests avoidance can instead happen at a much finer scale. Hyenas may comfortably inhabit lion territory while still changing course when a lion draws nearer.

“People imagine these interactions as face-offs at a carcass; the data show the spacing operates at ranges where the animals may not even be in sight of one another,” Barker told ZME Science.

The older view may have endured precisely because it was based on the encounters people could actually see. Hyenas crowding around a lion kill are conspicuous; the countless moments when one animal changes course in response to another are not. Following both species continuously through the bush at night was effectively impossible until researchers could compare simultaneous GPS fixes.

“So I don’t think the old view was wrong so much as incomplete: it described one scale of the relationship, and our study adds the other,” she explained. “Hyenas exploit lions’ kills AND treat lions as a danger to be managed, and both are part of the same rivalry.”

For Barker, the result also closes a loop that began years earlier in the field. She had watched lions actively tracking hyenas and been told she was probably seeing chance encounters. The GPS data finally gave those observations a measurable pattern. The study suggests that lions and hyenas negotiate their coexistence constantly, often at distances and behind the scenes.

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Ethology.