Tivat, a female brown hyaena, was afraid of seals when she first encountered them. Over a few months, she learned to kill seal pups - not unusual for a brown hyaena. Just one year after her first encounter with seals, Tivat did something that (to our knowledge) no other brown hyaena has achieved: she killed an adult Cape fur seal! To understand this achievement, you need to know a little more about brown hyaenas. Every carnivore textbook will tell you that they are primarily scavengers, with only 6-16% of their meals coming from things they have killed. They are known to eat snakes, insects, and even fruits and vegetables! The hyaenas living along the coastline of Namibia are renowned for killing seal pups, and probably hunt more than their inland relatives. Nonetheless, they prefer taking pups that are sleeping or not paying attention to their surroundings. The unsuspecting seal pup is quickly dispatched with a crushing bite to the head. Dr Marie Lemerle of the Brown Hyena Research Project thought she had witnessed all of the brown hyaena's hunting strategies, until Tivat showed up. I've spent over 3,000 hours watching brown hyaenas foraging near seal colonies, she says, sometimes they pretend to be sleeping to get the pups to relax and forget that a predator is there; other times they dash into the colony and grab any pup that is too slow to get away.