Mothers don't share with their children. Males are terrorized by females. Both sexes have prodigious appendages, and only a practiced eye can tell them apart.

These are the facts of life for a spirited community of spotted hyenas that lives in the Berkeley hills - and is suddenly being downsized, despite its unique status in the research world.

Turbo and Zephyr moved to the San Diego Zoo on Thursday. Eight others will go to Florida next year - three to Busch Gardens in Tampa Bay in January, five to Disney's Animal Kingdom in Orlando in June. Like many Bay Area residents, they simply can't afford to stay here.

"They're wonderful animals," said Steve Glickman, principal investigator with the Berkeley Hyena Project. "They're very easy to give away."

But it's the last thing he wants to do.

Glickman, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and integrative biology, started the colony in 1985 with friend and colleague Laurence Frank. They brought 20 cubs from Kenya, where they would have starved to death because their mothers were being poisoned by Masai tribesmen in order to preserve their cattle. The cubs were housed in a facility high above campus, rotated among indoor and outdoor pens.

The hyenas proliferated, along with research papers on their social behavior and sexual differentiation.

In mid-October, funds from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development dried up. The National Science Foundation quickly provided a $200,000 grant, which will keep the colony and its 20 remaining members intact for at least 15 months while other money is sought.

"It costs $10.50 per day per hyena," said Glickman, who is also the director of the complex where the hyenas live: the Field Station for the Study of Behavior, Ecology and Reproduction.

Physicians from a range of specialties have been drawn to the research because of its implications for people, Glickman said. For example, the work is likely to help doctors understand such things as disorders of human urogenital development and the effects of androgens on fertility in human females.

In one case, the project's research was cited in a paper about a girl born at UCSF with male external genitalia. There was a defect in placental metabolism that allowed abnormally high quantities of androgen to be secreted by the placenta - much like a hyena placenta - instead of the estrogen issued by a normal human placenta.

On a recent afternoon in Berkeley, the animals happily greeted Glickman and the pork neck bones he had brought them. Gorgeous, playful and insatiably curious, the descendants of the original group from Africa are the only captive hyena research colony in the world.

When Glickman tossed the bones into one enclosure, Scooter devoured them while her cub, Harley, watched.

"Sharing is not a big thing with hyenas," Glickman said.

In the next pen, however, Nairobi was more generous toward her baby, 3-month-old Ozzy.

"She's an anti-androgen-treated female," the professor said.

It was a possible explanation for the mother's unusual behavior: She was exposed in the uterus to a substance, injected by researchers, that might have subdued some aggressive tendencies.

The female spotted hyena, as it turns out, is one of the world's weirdest mammals. The clitoris resembles a penis and she sports a pseudo-scrotum with bulges that hint at testicles but are actually sacs of fat. She has no external vaginal opening.

"She urinates, mates and gives birth through the clitoris, and she gets erections just like a male," Glickman said. "That's what confuses people."

In the world of hyenas, erections are more plentiful than on an X-rated movie set, whether the result of etiquette or excitement over anything at all. Spotted hyenas are startling for other reasons. Adult females in a group dominate adult males and work together in coalitions. And the ferocious newborns frequently kill their twins as soon as they enter the world.

"They're really out there," Glickman said.

In Kenya during the mid-1980s, he and his wife, Krista, tucked the hyena cubs they'd rescued into their sleeping bags to protect them from lions during the night. They'd have to clean up bodily fluids the next morning, but that was fine - their tiny charges had survived.

"The things I like about them are the same things people like about their dogs," Glickman said. "As a social carnivore, they have a wonderfully rich repertoire of behavior and they can form bonds with people like me. That's really fun and it's really a privilege."

Those with less familiarity and knowledge are not as appreciative. For centuries, spotted hyenas have been portrayed as gutless, reeking and unsightly scavengers with a deranged, unearthly laugh. An account in a 12th century Latin bestiary said they were "accustomed to live in the sepulchres of the dead and to devour their bodies."

In a paper titled "The Spotted Hyena from Aristotle to the Lion King: Reputation is Everything," published in the journal Social Research in fall 1995, Glickman systematically punctured myths and stereotypes.

"There are no 'save-the-hyena' committees, and their persistent public relations problems could have very serious consequences for the preservation of hyena habitats and the long-term prospects for these species," he wrote. "This has been an issue of concern to the scientists who study these animals."

That concern is partly what drives Glickman and the other researchers involved in the Berkeley Hyena Project - an extraordinary network of scientists from at least 10 universities, as well as disciplines that include anatomy, neuroscience, pediatric endocrinology, obstetrics/gynecology and urology.

Elihu Gerson, a sociologist of science who is studying the collaboration, said it's very unusual in duration and scope.

"It's not just that it's many different specialties (although that's impressive all by itself), it's different specialties making technical connections that almost never get made," Gerson wrote in an e-mail.

Meanwhile, other scientists - including Frank, the wildlife biologist affiliated with UC Berkeley who founded the East Bay colony with Glickman - still conduct research in Africa on hyenas in the wild.

"We're always working back and forth and staying in close touch," Glickman said. "Time after time, an awful lot of what occurs in nature shows up here and then you can study it. For example, when these little babies (in Berkeley) grew up to be adult females, not only did they terrorize the adult males they lived with, but they also formed a matrilineal dominance hierarchy. We had no idea that would happen."

Among the researchers' most significant findings: "Masculine" genitalia can be created by a route that doesn't involve male hormones; the placenta is a potential source of hormones that can affect sexual differentiation; androstenedione, long regarded as a weak adrenal androgen, can be secreted by the ovaries of female mammals, including some ailing humans, in quantities that could have a major impact on cycling and fertility; differentiation and development of female external genitalia is an active process in all mammals, though traditionally viewed as passive - something that happens in the absence of male hormones.

There are also more obvious conclusions, such as one Glickman reached long ago.

"It's hard to be a hyena male," he said.

5 things to know about spotted hyenas:

1) Thirty-six residents of the Berkeley Hyena Colony have gone to zoos in places as far as Quebec and Perth, Australia, and as close as Oakland, where Tuffy and Dos Equis can be found.

2) In terms of tonnage of meat devoured, spotted hyenas are perhaps the most significant terrestrial carnivore in the world and kill much of the food that lions in Africa end up scavenging.

3) There are four species of hyena. Only the spotted variety features females with pseudo-penises similar to the males'.

4) Female hyenas and their young eat ahead of all males in the group, which might be one of the biggest advantages of female dominance and aggressiveness.

5) The Berkeley Hyena Project has euthanized only a few animals in 22 years, and they were old or sick.

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Source: Berkeley Hyena Project