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On the central coast of British Columbia, the Indigenous Haíɫzaqv or Heiltsuk Nation has been battling an invader: the invasive European green crab. The highly aggressive creature gobbles up native clam and crabs and damages fish habitats. To control this crab, members of the Haíɫzaqv community set up traps containing herring and sea lion meat. But they noticed that something or someone was stealing these traps, bringing them ashore, and grabbing the bait. Even traps placed in deep water.
It turns out the thieves were wolves. Remote motion-triggered footage from May 2024 caught them on camera. This might be the first recorded example of tool use by a wolf, findings recently shared in the journal Ecology and Evolution. In one clip, a female wolf was caught lugging the buoy to shore, tugging the attached rope toward land with her mouth, and finally chomping through the netting to reach the bait. The clever deed only took three minutes, according to the footage. In another video, captured nearly a year later, a different wolf was spotted pulling on a line tied to a partially submerged crab trap to reach the bait.
Wolves and their canid relatives have serious smarts, including the ability to learn human words, according to a growing stash of evidence. Over the past decade, scientists have discovered that captive dingoes seem to use tools, along with domesticated dogs—but such behaviors hadn’t been seen outside of domesticated contexts.
Lots of other species of animals have been observed using tools, of course: sea otters, capuchin monkeys, chimpanzees, crows, and even insects. Generally these animals turn to tools to better access food, according to the new paper, and some species may be less likely to use tools given other adaptations that serve similar purposes.
Whether the bait theft demonstrated by the British Columbian wolves qualifies as tool use depends on what definition you use. Tool use is “typically understood as using an external object to achieve a specific goal with intent,” the paper authors note, which could theoretically include stick chewing by dogs. But stricter definitions involve “modifying or reorienting the object,” Phie Jacobs wrote for Science. Some researchers have argued that rope pulling specifically can’t be counted as tool use.
Still, the behavior in the clips suggest “sophisticated intelligence,” the authors acknowledge. It’s possible a wolf lurking nearby was able to smell the baits, Science reported, and learned how to grab them “incrementally” by beginning with exposed traps before reaching deeper ones. Local wolves also could’ve learned by peering at Haíɫzaqv guardians as they gathered the traps on boats.
Read more: “The Dark Side of Wolf Reintroduction”
So far, it’s unclear whether other wild wolves use similar tactics. The authors said it’s possible that, due to relatively low threats from humans compared to other areas around the world, this population of wolves was able to “develop confidence and devote time to exploring novel behaviors such as those observed in this study.”
Future insights may be gleaned by the Haíɫzaqv Wolf and Biodiversity Project, which is run by the Haíɫzaqv Nation’s Integrated Resource Management Department and the State University of New York College of Environment Science and Forestry. The project is keeping close tabs on the area’s wolves via remote cameras and other non-invasive methods.
William Housty, director of the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department, thinks multiple wolves are breaking into these traps. This behavior didn’t shock Housty, who is a descendant of the nation’s wolf clan. “Sometimes we forget that the species that exist with us, around us, are just as intelligent as we are,” he told The New York Times. 
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Lead image: Szczepan Klejbuk / Shutterstock
