In a scientific first, biologists recorded a wild wolf potentially using tools
A wild wolf living on British Columbia’s central coast was filmed pulling a crab pot out of the ocean to eat the bait – a never-before-seen behavior that may be the first documented use of tools by a wolf.
The traps were set by the Heiltsuk Nation (Haíɫzaqv) as part of an environmental management program managed by the Indigenous community. The program focuses in part on combating the spread of the European green crab, an invasive species that ravages local ecosystems.
“The traps were starting to become damaged, and the damage appeared to have been caused by a bear or a wolf,” said Kyle Artelle, an assistant professor in the College of Environmental and Forestry Sciences at the State University of New York and co-author of a new study on the discovery.
“For traps in shallow water, it makes sense: A bear or wolf could just approach them. But some of them were in very deep water and weren’t exposed even at the lowest tide. The assumption was that it couldn’t be a bear or wolf, because they don’t dive. So who could it be?”
To find out, researchers installed motion-triggered cameras, hoping to see an otter or a seal. Instead, one of the cameras captured a wolf swimming toward shore with a buoy in its mouth before dropping it onto the sand. Then she grabbed the line that was attached to the buoy and pulled it until a trap came out of the water. The animal continued to pull the trap toward shore until it was in a shallow area, then she opened a box containing the bait, a piece of herring.
“We were surprised. It wasn’t what we expected, to say the least,” Artelle said. “People who are lucky enough to spend time with wolves know that they are super intelligent, so the fact that they are capable of doing very intelligent things, in itself, is not surprising. But this kind of behavior has never been seen before.”
Targeted action, not play
The researchers don’t know how many wolves learned this behavior, but they filmed another interaction between another wolf and a trap. This recording, however, did not show whether this wolf had extracted the fully submerged cartridge.
Artelle said he thinks the wolves might have discovered the traps by seeing humans drop them off boats — or they might 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 this interaction is that the wolf had to follow a series of steps to reach the bait, Artelle said. “It’s a sequence of behaviors that ultimately leads him to achieve that goal. It’s about problem solving, and it’s problem solving exactly like humans do,” he said. “We would have done the exact same thing if we had tried to access this trap from the shore.”
The wolf’s actions also appear completely intentional, even though the submerged trap is not visible at all, Artelle added. “She doesn’t shoot randomly,” he explained. “It doesn’t look like she’s playing. Anyone who owns a dog knows what it looks like when she’s playing. It’s very focused. She’s perfectly efficient. She’s even looking at the end of the line like she’s waiting for the moment when that trap is going to appear.”
The wolf’s ability to perform this behavior could be linked to conditions in Heiltsuk territory, one of the few regions in the world where wolves are not heavily hunted or trapped, according to Artelle. “The question this poses to us is: Could this behavior be developing here because the wolves aren’t too concerned about having to look over their shoulders?
Use of tools or not?
Since Jane Goodall first documented chimpanzee tool use in the 1970s, researchers have observed other species engaging in this sophisticated behavior, including dolphins, elephants, birds, and, at a basic level, even some insects.
Artelle said he believes the wolf’s action qualifies as use of a tool, but he acknowledges that is a subjective assessment. “Some definitions say tool use means using an object outside oneself to achieve a goal, which is clearly the case,” he said. “But others say you have to build the tool somehow. So in this case, she didn’t tie 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 create the crab trap, so she doesn’t really show tool use.’ » I didn’t build this laptop that I’m currently using; we use a lot of tools that we don’t build 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 noted, opens the door to adding other 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, to enable true use of the tool, the object must be oriented or modified in some way, according to Bradley Smith, a psychology lecturer at Central Queensland University in Australia. “This is not a traditional or advanced example of tool use, and to me it probably should not be defined as tool use,” Smith, who was not involved in the research, wrote in an email. This should not detract from the fact that the wolf’s action is an impressive and clear example of problem-solving and higher-order thinking, as well as a glimpse into the hidden world of nature and wolves, he added.
Ultimately, there’s no point fighting over labels because they reflect arbitrary definitions, noted Alex Kacelnik, professor emeritus of behavioral ecology at the University of Oxford in England, who was also not involved in the research. “This is a beautiful set of observations, and the authors do an excellent job of addressing its possible significance,” Kacelnik wrote in an email.
“What matters is how behavior is learned and what controls it once learned. As the authors rightly point out, humans never completely ‘understand’ the physics of what they do, but they know what works based on their experience.”
The study was published November 17 in the journal Ecology and Evolution.
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