One damp spring evening last year, a wolf hauled a crab trap ashore off the central Pacific coast of British Columbia. The rangy animal made a delectable meal of the bait inside, and unknowingly launched a healthy debate about her feat.
The gray wolf (Canis lupus) had been recorded on a motion-triggered camera installed by environmental wardens — known as Guardians — from the Haíɫzaqv Nation Indigenous community. The wolf’s trap-pulling behavior may be the first evidence of tool use by a wild canid, researchers report November 17 in Ecology and Evolution.
To Kyle Artelle, an ecologist who coleads the Haíɫzaqv Wolf and Biodiversity Project, the footage was “completely revelatory.”
“The amount of confidence she shows, and the efficiency of that behavior — it certainly suggests this is not her first rodeo,” says Artelle, of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse.
Tool use, broadly defined as the deliberate manipulation of an object to achieve a goal, has been seen in domestic dogs, captive dingoes and many wild animals. Not so in free-living wolves, though they move mostly at twilight, making close observation rare.
Haíɫzaqv Guardians had noticed many crab traps dragged onto the beach, their netting mangled and bait missing. The wardens initially thought marine mammals might be to blame. Or maybe bears. Remote cameras not only revealed the real culprit, but also later captured similar, less conclusive glimpses of the same behavior in additional wolves.
Whether this qualifies as tool use, however, remains a matter of debate.
“The definition is pretty elastic,” says Artelle’s coauthor Paul Paquet, an ecologist from the University of Victoria in Canada. He argues that the wolf’s deliberate pulling of the buoy line — a multistep process involving repeated trips into the water to haul in the rope, tug by steady tug, until the trap surfaced — meets the spirit, if not the strict letter, of the term.
But Benjamin Beck, a former curator at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C., who wrote the 1980 textbook codifying the scientific definition of animal tool behavior, says it falls short. Since the wolf did not establish or control the functional connection between the buoy, rope and trap, “we’re talking about object use, but not tool use,” he says.
Still, the technical distinction shouldn’t detract from the ingenuity on display, says evolutionary biologist Robert Shumaker, who leads the Indianapolis Zoo and coauthored updated versions of Beck’s reference work. The footage “expands our understanding of wolf behavior, that’s for sure.”
Formal definitions aside, the act reveals a new dimension of canid cunning, says wildlife biologist Dave Mech from the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, who has studied wolves for more than 60 years. In the wolf’s movements and focused persistence — buoy to rope, rope to trap, trap to food — Mech sees a clear grasp of cause and effect.
“She had to make a lot of connections there,” Mech says, evidence that wolves “have the mental abilities to perceive things like this that are out of their usual realm.”
For William Housty, a Haíɫzaqv Hereditary Chief who directs the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department in Bella Bella, the behavior also resonates with his people’s oral history. According to tradition, one tribe within the Haíɫzaqv Nation descends from a woman who gave birth to four wolf-children: beings who could shift between the two worlds of humans and wolves.
“It’s no secret how smart and sophisticated they are, because at one point in our history, wolves and humans had the ability to go back and forth to one another,” Housty says. “But to capture it for the world to see is really amazing.”
