Difference between jackal and spotted hyenas?
Answers
Explanation:
Generally speaking, Jackals scavenge more than Spotted Hyenas, but also hunt rodents and other small animals and birds. Jackals live in pairs and mate for life. Whereas Spotted Hyenas are very social and live in groups called 'clans' which are female-dominant.
Answer:
They are not even vaguely related.
Both will scavenge, but spotted hyenas at least hunt most of their own food and aardwolves eat two species of termites. Jackals scavenge a lot, but also hunt rodents and other small animals and birds.
Jackals, like most canids, live in mated pairs (sometimes along with older offspring). Hyenas have different social arrangements -- aardwolves live in mated pairs too, but all three of the other species seem to be female-dominant. (I say "seem to be" because we don't really know much about striped hyenas!)
A tl;dr on relationships: hyenas and jackals both belong to a clade of mammals called the Carnivora, or carnivorans. Beyond that, carnivorans get split into two big clades: the sort-of-doggy-like carnivorans (for example bears, all canids, weasels, skunks, raccoons . . .), and the kind-of-cat-like carnivorans (such as all cats, mongooses, and hyenas). Believe it or not, the hyenas are more closely related to cats than to dogs or jackals!
Quick note: there are three species of jackals: the golden or common jackal, the side-striped jackal, and the black-backed jackal. All three are closely related.
There are four hyena species: the famous spotted hyena that you see in most of the African wildlife shows, the brown hyena, the striped hyena, and the aardwolf. Of those three, only the spotted hyena lives in large groups, which scientists call "clans". The clans seem to be based on sisters living, hunting, and raising their cubs together, NOT on mated pairs as in canids. The females are promiscuous, and mating males are transients only loosely affiliated with the clan.