ScienceDaily (Mar. 7, 2009) — An international team of scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) in Berlin, Germany, and the University of Sheffield, UK, now answered the question how social status is inherited in one of the most social of all mammals, the spotted hyena.In a study published online recently in the scientific journal Behavioral Ecology, the scientists used observations during the last 20 years of rare cases of adoption among hyenas in the Serengeti