This might be the first recorded tool use by a wild wolf
While researchers are divided on the conclusion, the behavior shows wolves may be smarter than we thought.
In 2023, crab traps along the coast of British Columbia started showing mysterious damage. The Heiltsuk (Haíɫzaqv) Nation, an Indigenous group, had set them up to capture destructive, invasive European green crabs. Sometimes the traps were destroyed. Other times their nets had been torn. Whoever raided the traps always went after the plastic bait cups, which held bits of herring or sea lion carcass. It looked like the work of wolves or bears, but many of the compromised traps stayed submerged during the low tide, so maybe sea otters?
To find out, scientists, in partnership with the Heiltsuk Guardians, a group that monitors the territory and conducts their own research, set up a camera pointed at an underwater crab trap in May 2024. The camera captured a wolf nabbing bait from a crab trap. In a new study describing this behavior in the journal Ecology and Evolution, the researchers suggest that the incident might be the first reported tool use by a wild wolf.
Dogged tool-users
The footage shows a female wolf stalking out of the water and holding a buoy in her mouth. Stepping backwards, she walks on the rocky beach and sets down the buoy. Then she pads back into the water and grasps the rope extending from the buoy with her teeth to draw an unseen object closer to shore. Once the trap—a cone formed of a metal frame covered in netting—is exposed, she grabs it in her mouth and pulls into the shallows. Nosing through and chewing the netting, she frees the bait cup, scarfs down her snack and struts away.
From “the very first watch of the video, it was like—from my interpretation—this is tool use,” says Kyle Artelle, a study co-author and an ecologist at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York who was part of the team that set the traps. “Every motion is perfectly efficient,” and the animal seemed to know the connection between the trap’s parts. In another camera trap video, a different wolf is seen tugging a line attached to a buoy, and dozens if not hundreds of crab traps have been similarly damaged in the area.
People have seen canids, the group that includes dogs and their kin, using tools in captivity. In 2012, ethologist Bradley Smith of Central Queensland University in Adelaide, Australia, and his colleagues shared observations of a captive dingo dragging a table some 6 feet and then climbing onto it and grabbing an object that had been out of reach. The same dingo also moved a dog crate and stood on it, allowing him to see out of his enclosure.
“I couldn’t believe it,” says Smith, who wasn’t involved with the new work, referring to those early dingo observations. At the time, the list of animals known to be capable of higher-order tasks—going beyond using their instincts and simple reactions— was short, including primates, dolphins, elephants and crows. The dingo findings opened up new knowledge on canid capabilities.
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This new study shows how adaptable and clever wild wolves are, he says. While the dingoes lived in a sanctuary, the wolf behavior was spotted in the wild, “so that makes the wolf discovery more special and valuable,” he says.
Is it really tool use?
But there is disagreement in the scientific community about whether the wolf’s crab trap hack counts as tool use. Some argue that the creature has to fashion the tool itself for it to qualify as “tool use.” But humans use tools, such as computers, that they don’t personally build, Artelle says.
One definition of tool use is using an object to achieve a goal. By that logic this encounter with the trap counts, though it’s “not an advanced example of tool use,” Smith says.
But that definition doesn't capture all dimensions of tool use, says Robert Shumaker, an evolutionary biologist at the Indianapolis Zoo, who wasn’t part of the new study. He says that the most widely accepted definition includes several criteria for tool use.The wolf observation doesn’t fulfil every requirement because the animal did not connect the rope to the trap or arrange it some way connected to getting food.
“Just pulling on something that someone else arranged is not tool use,” Shumaker says.
Regardless of bona fide “tool use,” the observation of an unusual foraging technique is important for understanding wolf mental flexibility and complexity, Shumaker says. And qualifying as tool-use doesn’t make a behavior more sophisticated or a bigger accomplishment, he says.
Smith agrees that the value of this observation doesn’t come from how it fits with researchers’ definitions of tool use. “This shouldn’t detract from this being impressive and being a clear example of higher-order problem solving and thinking,” Smith says. The event shows goal-directed planning, understanding of a hidden reward, multi-step problem solving and persistence—though not all wolves may be as capable as this one.
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A place of wolves and people
This particular environment may help explain the curious behavior, Artelle says. Wolves in this part of British Columbia don’t experience much persecution from people. That might allow them free time on the beach to experiment with new behaviors, Artelle says. He and others are continuing to study wolves’ distribution, their behavior, and their roles in ecosystems through the ongoing Heiltsuk Wolf and Biodiversity Project.
The Heiltsuk Nation has lived among wolves for thousands of years, says William Housty, a hereditary chief in the Heiltsuk Nation and director of the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department, a group tasked with stewardship of the territory. He wasn’t part of this study, but collaborates with Artelle in other capacities.
“From a traditional perspective, we’ve always known that wolves are very intelligent beings,” Housty says. The discovery opens up new questions about what wolves are capable of.
