by A female wild wolf living on the central coast of British Columbia was filmed pulling a crab trap from the sea to eat the bait – an unprecedented behavior that may represent the first documented use of tools by a wolf.
The traps were set by the Heiltsuk Nation (Haíɫzaqv) as part of an indigenous community conservation program. The program focuses, among other things, on combating the spread of the European green crab, an invasive species that is devastating local ecosystems.
“The traps began to be damaged, and the damage actually looked like it had been caused by 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 co-author of a new study on the discovery.
“With the traps that are in shallow water, that makes sense – a bear or a wolf could just walk up to them. But some of them were in really deep water and weren’t exposed at even the lowest tide. The assumption was that 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 and thought they might see an otter or a seal. Instead, one of the cameras captured a wolf swimming to shore with a buoy in its mouth and then dropping it on the sand. Next, she grabbed the line attached to the buoy and pulled until a trap emerged from the water. The animal pulled the trap further toward the shore until it was in a shallow area and then broke open a canister containing the bait – a piece of herring.
“We were amazed. It was not what we expected, to say the least,” Artelle said. “People who are lucky enough to spend time around wolves know that they are super smart. So the fact that they are capable of highly intelligent things is not in itself surprising. But this type of behavior has never been observed before.”
Concentrated action, not a game
The researchers don’t know how many wolves have learned this behavior, but they filmed another interaction between another wolf and a trap. However, it was not clear from this recording whether this wolf had retrieved the fully submerged canister.
Artelle said he believes the wolves may have learned about the traps by seeing people dropping them from boats – or that they may have accessed a trap that was in shallow water due to low tide and then figured out how to retrieve deeper and 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 leads them to that goal. It’s about problem solving, just the way people do it,” he said. “We would have done exactly the same thing if we had tried to access this trap from the shore.”
The wolf’s actions also appeared to be completely premeditated, even though the submerged trap was not visible at all, Artelle added. “She doesn’t move randomly,” he explained. “It doesn’t look like she’s playing. Anyone who has a dog knows what it looks like when she’s playing. She’s very focused. She’s completely efficient. She even stares at the end of the line as if she’s waiting to see when the trap will appear.”
The wolf’s ability to exhibit this behavior may be related to conditions in Heiltsuk Territory, one of the few parts of the world where wolves are not heavily hunted or trapped, according to Artelle. “The question that arises for us is: Could this behavior develop here because the wolves are not so busy having to look over their shoulders?”
Use of tools or not?
Since Jane Goodall first documented tool use by chimpanzees in the 1970s, researchers have observed that other species also exhibit this sophisticated behavior, including dolphins, elephants, birds and—indeed—even some insects.
Artelle said he believes the wolf’s action qualifies as tool use, but acknowledges that it is a subjective assessment. “Some definitions say that tool use means using an object outside of one’s body to achieve a goal, which is clearly the case,” he said. “But others say you have to design the tool in some way. So in this case, she didn’t attach the line to the crab trap. It was already built for her.”
However, if a human had done what the wolf did, no one would hesitate to call it tool use, Artelle added. “We wouldn’t sit there and say, ‘She didn’t make the crab trap, so she doesn’t really show that she’s using tools.’ I didn’t build this laptop I’m currently using; We use a lot of tools that we don’t design ourselves.”
Marc Bekoff, an animal behavior expert and professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, agrees with Artelle’s assessment. The study, Bekoff said, opens the door to adding more animals to the ever-growing list of tool-using species. “Future research will answer the question of whether other wolves also learn to use a rope and whether this behavior is culturally transmitted within this population,” Bekoff, who was not involved in the research, added in an email.
However, according to Bradley Smith, a senior lecturer in psychology at Central Queensland University in Australia, the object must be oriented or modified in some way to enable true tool use. “It is not a traditional or advanced example of tool use and in my opinion probably should not be defined as tool use,” Smith, who was not involved in the research, wrote in an email. It should not take away from the fact that the wolf’s action was a powerful and clear example of problem solving and higher level thinking, as well as a glimpse into the hidden world of nature and wolves, he added.
Ultimately, arguing about labels is pointless because they reflect arbitrary definitions, noted Alex Kacelnik, professor emeritus of behavioral ecology at England’s University of Oxford, who also was not involved in the research. “This is a beautiful set of observations, and the authors do a great job of exploring their possible meaning,” Kacelnik wrote in an email.
“What matters is how the behavior is acquired and what controls it once it is acquired. As the authors rightly point out, humans never fully ‘understand’ the physics of what they do, but they know what works based on their experience.”
The study was published Nov. 17 in the journal Ecology and Evolution.
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