A female wild wolf living on the central coast of British Columbia was filmed pulling a crab trap out of the ocean to eat the bait — a never-before-seen behavior that could constitute the first documented use of tools by a wolf.

The traps were set by the Heiltsuk (Haíɫzaqv) Nation as part of an environmental stewardship program run by the indigenous community. The program centers in part on combating the spread of the European green crab, an invasive species that is ravaging local ecosystems.

“The traps were starting to get damaged, and the damage did look like it could have been a bear or a wolf,” said Kyle Artelle, an assistant professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry and coauthor of a new study about the discovery.

“For the traps that are in shallow water, that makes sense — a bear or wolf could just walk up to them. But some of them were in really deep water and not exposed even on the lowest tide. The assumption was it couldn’t be a bear or a wolf, because they don’t dive. So, who could it be?”

To find out, the researchers set up motion-triggered cameras, thinking they might see an otter or a seal. Instead, one of the cameras captured a wolf swimming to shore with a buoy in her mouth before dropping it on the sand. Next, she grabbed the line that was attached to the buoy and pulled it until a trap emerged from the water. The animal continued to haul the trap toward the shore until it was in a shallow area, and then she broke open a canister containing the bait — a piece of herring.

“We were amazed. It was not what we were expecting, to say the least,” Artelle said. “Folks who are lucky enough to spend time around wolves know they’re super smart, so the fact that they’re capable of doing highly intelligent things, in and of itself, isn’t surprising. But this kind of behavior has not been seen before.”

Focused action, not play

The researchers don’t know how many wolves have learned this behavior, but they did film another interaction between a different wolf and a trap. That recording, however, failed to show whether this wolf extracted the fully submerged canister.

Artelle said he believes that the wolves might have found out about the traps by seeing humans drop them from boats — or they may have accessed one that was in shallow waters due to low tides and then figured out how to retrieve progressively deeper traps.

What’s remarkable about the interaction is that the wolf had to put together a series of steps to get to the bait, Artelle said. “It’s a sequence of behaviors that ultimately gets her towards that goal. It’s problem-solving, and it’s problem-solving exactly the way humans do it,” he said. “We would have done the exact same thing if we were trying to access that trap from shore.”

The wolf’s actions also appear to be completely intentional despite the submerged trap not being visible at all, Artelle added. “She isn’t randomly pulling,” he explained. “It doesn’t look like she’s playing. Anyone with a dog knows what it looks like when they’re playing. This is very focused. She is being perfectly efficient. She’s even staring at the end of the line as if in anticipation of when that trap is going to show up.”

The ability of the wolf to come up with this behavior might be related to the conditions found in the Heiltsuk territory, one of the few parts of the world where wolves are not heavily hunted or trapped, according to Artelle. “The question that it raises for us is: Might this behavior develop here because the wolves aren’t so preoccupied with having to look over their shoulders?”

Tool use or not?

Ever since Jane Goodall first documented the use of tools by chimps in the 1970s, researchers have observed other species engaging in this sophisticated behavior, including dolphins, elephants, birds and — at a basic level — even some insects.

Artelle said he believes the wolf’s action qualifies as tool use, but he acknowledges it’s a subjective assessment. “Some definitions say tool use means the use of an object external to yourself to achieve a goal, which this clearly is,” he said. “But others say that you need to construct the tool in some way. So, in this instance, she didn’t tie the line to the crab trap. It was already built for her.”

If a human had done what the wolf did, however, no one would hesitate to call it tool use, Artelle added. “We wouldn’t sit there and say, ‘She didn’t create the crab trap, so she’s not really exhibiting tool use.’ I didn’t construct this laptop that I’m using right now; we use a lot of tools that we don’t construct ourselves.”

Marc Bekoff, an animal behavior expert and emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, agrees with Artelle’s assessment. The study, Bekoff noted, opens the door for adding more animals to the ever-growing list of species that use tools. “Future research will answer questions about whether other wolves also learn to use a rope and whether this behavior becomes culturally transmitted within this population,” Bekoff, who was not involved with the research, added in an email.

However, to have true tool use, the object should be oriented or modified in some way, according to Bradley Smith, a senior lecturer in psychology at Australia’s Central Queensland University. “It’s not a traditional or advanced example of tool use, and for me, probably shouldn’t be defined as tool use,” Smith, who was not involved in the research, wrote in an email. It shouldn’t detract from the fact that the wolf’s action is an impressive and clear example of higher-order problem-solving and thinking as well as a glimpse into the hidden world of nature and wolves, he added.

Ultimately, it is fruitless to fight about labels since they reflect arbitrary definitions, noted Alex Kacelnik, an emeritus professor of behavioral ecology at England’s University of Oxford, who also didn’t participate in the research. “This is a beautiful set of observations, and the authors do a great job in addressing its possible significance,” Kacelnik wrote in an email.

“What matters is how the behaviour is acquired and what controls it once it is acquired. As the authors correctly highlight, humans never fully ‘understand’ the physics of what they do, but they know what works based on their experience.”

The study was published November 17 in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

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