# The Complementary Role of Gestures in Spotted Hyena (Crocuta crocuta) Communication

## TL;DR

This paper explores how spotted hyenas use gestures to communicate, complementing their use of sounds and smells, and highlights the need for more research on visual communication in both wild and captive populations.

## Contribution

The paper synthesizes existing research to highlight the under-studied role of visual communication in spotted hyenas and emphasizes the need for more studies on captive populations.

## Key findings

- Only 13% of existing research on spotted hyena communication focuses on visual signals.
- Captive populations may develop behavioral innovations due to their strong social cognition.
- Gestures help spotted hyenas maintain dominance and reduce physical conflict.

## Abstract

Spotted hyenas live in fission–fusion societies, which require individuals to have robust social memory to congregate effectively in gregarious settings. Their sophisticated social structure confers adaptive benefits to individuals that can quickly convey their dominance rank and recognize the social statuses of others. Here, we focus on the role of visual communication (focusing on gestural communication) in this capacity and how it complements olfactory and acoustic communication in mediating conspecific communications in spotted hyenas. Facial and manual gestures aid spotted hyenas in maintaining relative dominance, mitigating the likelihood of physical altercations, and promoting group cohesion and cooperation. We examine how spotted hyenas use gestural communication in captive and wild settings and investigate how captivity modifies specific gestural behaviors.

Spotted hyenas live in fission–fusion social societies, requiring them to adopt a flexible multimodal communication system across variable spatial scales. However, researchers have extensively studied acoustic and olfactory signals for conspecific communication compared to visual signals, especially in wild populations. Here, we reviewed 46 articles on the Web of Science on social communication in wild and captive spotted hyena populations to synthesize our collective knowledge of the extent to which spotted hyenas utilize sensory cues to communicate and how flexible they are between captive and wild populations. Across all articles, 54% focused on acoustic communication (n = 25), 33% on olfaction (n = 15), leaving only 13% on vision (n = 6). Most of this research studied wild populations (82%; n = 38), leaving an intriguing gap in our knowledge of captive populations and their potential for developing behavioral innovations due to their robust social cognition (i.e., modifying behavioral form and/or function observed in wild populations to better accommodate the captive performer’s environment and social needs). Improving our understanding of innovation development in this species has possible benefits for studying behavioral evolution and improving captive welfare (e.g., identifying normal vs. stereotypic behavior) in this social carnivore.