Predators in motion: fine-scale dyadic movements reveal interference competition and asymmetric coordination in African lions and spotted hyenas

Introduction Interference competition among sympatric large carnivores is a central process structuring African predator guilds. However, the moment-by-moment movement decisions that underlie it are difficult to observe directly in elusive species ranging over remote landscapes. Methods We applied a relative-motion analysis to high-frequency GPS telemetry from 17 lions ( Panthera leo ) and 14 spotted hyenas ( Crocuta crocuta ) tracked at 5-min intervals across two southern African ecosystems, the Etosha National Park in Namibia and the Chobe–Linyanti system in northern Botswana. We deliberately restricted the dyadic analysis to timesteps with real, concurrent fixes from both individuals rather than continuous-time-imputed positions. Across the 23 dyads that met this criterion, we classified each individual's movement at each timestep as toward, orthogonal to, or away from its partner. We then tested the resulting toward-versus-away proportion against a null of no directional bias using three complementary inferential layers that explicitly handle the within-dyad autocorrelation and between-dyad individual reuse: per-dyad exact binomial confidence intervals, an across-dyad Wilcoxon signed-rank test, and a generalized linear mixed-effects model on the per-timestep data with a random intercept for dyad. Results The retreat-by-hyena signal is supported across all three layers. None of the three inferential layers supported a uniform population-level lion approach to hyenas, but a directionally consistent pattern indicated an approach bias for male lions and no consistent directional bias for female lions. Intraspecific lion dyads in Etosha resolve mating-pair and satellite-pride coordination at scales as fine as 15 m; hyena dyads in either ecosystem produced no concurrent fixes below 1 km, recovering the exclusive clan-territorial structure of the species. Discussion The relative-motion framework demonstrates that fine-scale telemetry can substitute for behavioral observation in landscapes where direct observation is logistically infeasible. It also reveals that the asymmetric interference-competition signature predicted by guild theory operates through the subordinate species' reactive avoidance at multi-kilometer scales rather than through symmetric two-species coordination.