GPS collars reveal lions actively pursue hyenas, reversing assumptions about predator hierarchy

For decades, wildlife researchers have operated under a simple assumption: hyenas follow lions. The logic seemed sound. Hyenas are scavengers. Lions are apex predators. When a lion makes a kill, hyenas show up to claim what's left. The hierarchy felt obvious, settled. But Dr. Nancy Barker, a researcher at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, kept seeing something different during her fieldwork in the African bush. She watched lions actively tracking hyenas. When she mentioned this to other leading scientists, they told her she had it backward—that what she was observing were chance encounters, nothing more. She suspected otherwise.

Barker decided to test the assumption with precision. Over four years, she and her team deployed GPS collars on 17 lions and 14 spotted hyenas across three protected areas: Etosha National Park in Namibia, and Chobe National Park and the Linyanti Conservancy in Botswana. The collars recorded a location every five minutes during peak activity hours. The work was methodical and unglamorous. Barker spent months simply learning the animals—identifying which individuals held the highest rank in their social groups, understanding pride and clan dynamics, mapping territories. She maintained camera traps during the day and conducted observations at night. The reality of wildlife research, she notes, bears little resemblance to the dramatic encounters people imagine.

The data told a story that contradicted decades of assumption. Barker identified 23 pairs of simultaneously tracked animals, including 10 lion-hyena pairs, and analyzed thousands of interactions between them. For each moment when both animals had a GPS fix at the same time, she asked a single question: Was each animal moving toward the other, away from it, or off to the side? When this question was repeated across thousands of simultaneous locations and many pairs of animals, a pattern emerged with unmistakable clarity. Hyenas were mostly moving away. Lions, especially males, were mostly moving toward them. The pattern held up across three independent statistical tests, suggesting it reflected a genuine, repeatable behavioral pattern rather than random chance.

The implications reversed the conventional hierarchy. It is not hyenas that pursue lions for scraps. It is lions that actively approach hyenas, and hyenas that retreat. Male lions showed this behavior most consistently. Female lions, by contrast, appeared more ambivalent in their responses, reacting differently depending on which other pride members were present—though Barker acknowledges that more data would be needed to confirm this finer distinction. The findings suggest that the balance of power visible in the African bush is not fixed by species but emerges from thousands of individual decisions each animal makes about risk and reward.

Barker published these results in Frontiers in Ethology, but she is careful about the limits of what the data can claim. Tracking this many large carnivores simultaneously is extraordinarily difficult. The study included only moments when both animals had simultaneous GPS fixes, the most rigorous approach but one that inevitably reduces the available data. Some of the finer-scale findings should be viewed as trends rather than firm conclusions. With unlimited resources, Barker says, she would extend this approach to other members of the carnivore community, mapping how the entire guild negotiates space and risk. The ultimate goal is to connect these movement patterns to what matters most for the animals themselves: which ones survive and reproduce. The question shifts from describing behavior to understanding how behavior shapes which animals thrive.