Female hyenas avoid incestuous mating by encouraging male relatives to look elsewhere for sex, new research shows.
The females use their dominant status in hyena society to spurn males in their clan, thereby avoiding the risk of inbreeding, the study suggests.
This tactic has never been demonstrated before in mammals but may be widespread among other species that live in groups, the scientists added.
The ten-year study was based on eight groups, or clans, of spotted hyenas living in Ngorongoro Crater, the world's largest intact volcanic caldera, in Tanzania.
A team led by Oliver Höner at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany, investigated the dispersal of male hyenas using DNA samples and field observations of more than 400 individuals.
The findings, reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature, indicate that young female hyenas prefer mating with males that immigrate from other clans, or with males that were born after they were.
Older females were also found to mate with immigrants, favoring those that had courted them for several years.
As a result of these preferences, 89 percent of young males left their clans to take their sexual exploits elsewhere, the researchers found.
Höner said this pattern is the result of females following an instinctual mating rule that prevents incestuous encounters.
"This rule requires males to have entered the group after the females were born," he said.
"The older females also have an additional rule: They don't particularly like new, young males that they don't know well," Höner added.
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