A female wolf was caught dragging a crab trap out of the water to get a snack. Some scientists say that this behavior demonstrates their ability to use tools.
Where the temperate rainforest meets the Pacific Ocean near Bella Bella, British Columbia, the Heiltsuk, a Canadian First Nation whose name is often transcribed as haíɫzaqv, have worked to contain a European green crab problem in their territory.
In 2021, the Guardian program, which manages the nation’s traditional lands and waters, began setting traps to eliminate this invasive species. However, the traps, simple circular net frames baited with plastic cups filled with herring or pieces of sea lion, were destroyed again and again, in a manner as constant as it was disconcerting.
Some broken traps lay in deep water and were never exposed at low tide.
They thought, “Maybe it’s otters, maybe it’s mink, maybe it’s seals. But we didn’t know,” said Kyle Artelle, an ecologist at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Sciences and Forestry who works with the Heiltsuk nation.
To identify the crab trap thief, Milène Wiebe, a graduate student at the University of Alberta, and Richard Cody Reid, a heiltsuk warden, installed a remote camera in May 2024. What they captured on video the next day was neither a marine mammal nor a mustelid.
She was a wolf.
In the video, the wild canid swims from the deepest to the shallowest waters, towing the red and white buoy attached to the trap with its jaws. Then back towards the shore while raising the rope to the surface of the water. After releasing the buoy and shaking himself to dry off a little, he goes back into the water, grabs another piece of rope and pulls again. With a third pull, the trap emerges deep enough for you to grab it.
Then, tearing through the net to reach the orange bait container, he carries it to the beach, places it upright on the stones, removes the sea lion strips with his tongue, checks for remains, swallows them, and trots away nonchalantly.
Researchers describe the brief scene, which appears in a paper published Monday in the journal Ecology and Evolution, as the first documented case of a wolf using a tool.
According to Artelle and Paul Paquet, a predator ecologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and co-author of the study, tool use is broadly defined as employing an external object to intentionally achieve a specific goal.
Getting bogged down — or rather, trying to untangle the issue — some experts argue that pulling the rope shouldn’t count as “tool use” because humans, not animals, put the rope there. But whether or not the wolf’s foraging is considered tool use, it’s still an “incredible behavior,” Artelle said.
“Even if we don’t want to call it tool use, the fact that the trap was completely underwater and out of sight makes it difficult to argue that she didn’t understand the connection between all of these steps,” he said. The wolf completed the sequence in less than three minutes, he added, which meant “this was no random romp.” He suggested that the behavior was “unwaveringly intentional,” applying a phrase from a study on tool use in chimpanzees.
The use of tools on non-human animals has long been the subject of controversy. “For a long time we were thought to be the only creatures on Earth that used and made tools,” said the late Jane Goodall, who in 1960 memorably observed wild chimpanzees stripping leaves from a twig and then inserting the clean sticks into the holes of a termite mound to eat termites.
Since then, evidence that octopuses, crows, fish, elephants, crocodiles, and insects use tools has dispelled our arrogance that tool use is unique to humans. Still, the scientific debate persists.
For Sabina Nowak, a wolf ecologist at the University of Warsaw who was not involved in the study, the discovery is not surprising.
“They are very intelligent,” he said.
Susana Carvalho, a primatologist and paleoanthropologist at Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, said this observation reinforced evidence that tool use by non-humans is more widespread than previously thought. The important thing about this new study, he said, is that “another species with complex sociability is capable of innovating and solving problems.”
He also noted, as did the study’s authors, that finding this behavior in Heiltsuk territory might not be a coincidence. Wolves in this region experience minimal human persecution and disturbance, so they may have more freedom to explore and experiment with new strategies.
It is still a mystery whether this wolf is a lone innovator or represents a broader cultural pattern. But William Housty, director of the Heiltsuk territory’s integrated resource management department, suspects several wolves are involved. “You talk to our team every day and every day they come in with busted bait boxes,” he said.
Housty, a descendant of the nation’s wolf clan, has a deep respect for the species, and is not surprised by the cunning of wolves.
“Sometimes we forget that the species that exist with us, around us, are as intelligent as us,” he reflected.
