The Heiltsuk Nation has been waging an eternal war against an invasive European green crab menace. They set traps to ensnare these little invaders in an effort to help save eelgrass and protect salmon and clams from the wave of crabs. But they noticed that something was destroying their traps.
Otters? Maybe some seals or something? In May 2024, they got their answer. A remote camera captured a female wolf swimming out from deep water, grabbing the trap’s buoy, and dragging it toward the shore. She lifts the rope, tugs it repeatedly, and in under three minutes, hauls a fully submerged trap into her grasp, which she then rips apart to pluck out the orange bait cup. She licked it clean of sea lion meat and then trotted away.
Researchers say this might be the first documented case of tool use in wild canids.
Now, that’s not a statement researchers make all willy-nilly. Specific conditions have to be met. For instance, does pulling a rope count if humans tied the rope? Because some experts out there are arguing that simply pulling a string doesn’t constitute tool use. Conversely, others argue that it sure does, because that act constitutes a cause-and-effect.
One thing that remains clear in all of this is that the wolf wasn’t making it up as she went. Her steps were purposeful and likely repeatable. The Heiltsuk Guardians think she’s probably not the only one doing it since bait boxes keep showing up busted open, indicating that this isn’t a one-off behavior exhibited by a particularly clever individual wolf, but rather a cultural behavior.
This particular set of wolves has probably been given all the freedom in the world to evolve such behavior since they live in a region where wolves are rarely hunted by humans, thus affording them the freedom to experiment with little projects like hacking our crab traps.
This one little observation is probably going to lead to several years’ worth of debate, but one thing we can definitively state is that wolves are a lot cleverer than we thought they were.
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