The WWF reports that researchers in Turk­menistan spot­ted a striped hye­na in a park. The species once ranged from Africa through to India and Cen­tral Asia, but habi­tat degra­da­tion and declin­ing prey pop­u­la­tions have caused their Asian pop­u­la­tions to decline.

This dis­cov­ery in a pro­tect­ed area of Turk­menistan sug­gests that con­ser­va­tion mea­sures are suc­cess­ful­ly pro­tect­ing even top preda­tors which require more space and resources than many oth­er species.

Striped hye­nas (Hyae­na hyae­na) are a dif­fer­ent genus from the spot­ted hye­na (Cro­cu­ta cro­cu­ta). Striped hye­nas are gen­er­al­ly soli­tary, or live in small fam­i­ly groups.

Spot­ted hye­nas, how­ev­er, have social groups that can be as large as 80 indi­vid­u­als. Like many species, hye­nas use mat­ing to estab­lish and main­tain dom­i­nance hier­ar­chies with­in each clan. In a matri­ar­chal soci­ety, this cre­ates com­pli­ca­tions, and either as a way of pre­vent­ing aggres­sion from oth­er females or to sim­pli­fy sim­u­lat­ed mat­ings, spot­ted hye­nas have and enlarged cli­toris that looks almost iden­ti­cal to a male penis; a struc­ture known as a pseudope­nis. In addi­tion, females devel­op a struc­ture sim­i­lar to a scro­tum, filled with spongy tis­sue which sim­u­lates testes. Males and females are prac­ti­cal­ly indis­tin­guish­able with­out blood tests or dissection.

Because of this, the species was long thought to be bisex­u­al, but lat­er research showed that to be based on misiden­ti­fi­ca­tions and misunderstandings.