Hyena

Hyenas are the cleanup crew of African ecosystems - large scavengers that rapidly consume soft tissues from carcasses, fragmenting them and accelerating the first stage of decomposition. But their ecological role extends beyond scavenging: they're major predators in the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem, with approximately 7,500 hyenas hunting wildebeest alongside 3,000 lions. Yet together they cannot deplete the 2 million wildebeest herd. This is predator dilution through numbers - the migrating herd is so large that even intense predation barely dents it.

Hyenas demonstrate a fundamental ecological principle: Scale changes the rules. At small population sizes, predators control prey populations. At large population sizes, prey populations overwhelm predator capacity through sheer numbers. The wildebeest migration succeeds not because individual animals are particularly well-defended, but because the collective overwhelms the system's processing capacity. Predators can only kill and consume so many animals per day - beyond that threshold, additional prey survive simply through saturation.

The business parallel is precise: At sufficient scale, you become too big to efficiently attack. Hyenas teach that concentrated predation is devastating to small populations but ineffective against massive ones. This is why startups fear competition but Amazon doesn't - past a certain scale, the constraint shifts from vulnerability to competitors to the physical limits of how much damage competitors can inflict per unit time.