In a scientific first, biologists recorded a wild wolf potentially using tools

A female feral wolf living on the central coast of British Columbia was filmed pulling a crab trap from the ocean to eat the bait; This was a never-before-seen behavior that may have been the first documented use of tools by a wolf.

Traps were set by the Heiltsuk (Haíɫzaqv) nation as part of an environmental management program carried out by the indigenous community. The program focuses in part on combating the spread of the European green crab, an invasive species that is devastating local ecosystems.

“The traps were starting to get damaged, and the damage looked like a bear or a wolf,” said Kyle Artelle, an assistant professor at the State University of New York School of Environmental Science and Forestry and co-author of a new study. to work about discovery.

“For traps in shallow water, this makes sense; a bear or wolf could walk up to them. But some were in really deep water and wouldn’t be exposed even at low tide. The assumption was that it couldn’t have been a bear or wolf because they didn’t dive. So who could it be?”

To find out, researchers set up motion-triggered cameras thinking they might spot an otter or a seal. Instead, one of the cameras captured a wolf swimming towards the shore with a buoy in its mouth before dropping it onto the sand. He then grabbed the rope attached to the buoy and pulled until a trap emerged from the water. The animal continued to pull the trap towards the shore until it reached a shallow area and then broke open the box containing the bait (a piece of herring).

“We were surprised. It wasn’t something we expected in the least,” Artelle said. “People lucky enough to spend time around wolves know that they are super intelligent, so it’s no surprise that they are capable of doing extremely clever things on their own. But this type of behavior has never been seen before.”

Focused action, not games

Researchers don’t know how many wolves learned this behavior, but they filmed another interaction between a different wolf and the decoy. However, this recording could not show whether this wolf had removed the completely submerged box.

Artelle said he believes the wolves may have learned about the traps by seeing people knock them off boats, or they may have reached a trap in shallow water due to low tide and then figured out how to retrieve deeper traps.

What was remarkable about the interaction, Artelle said, was that the wolf had to put together a series of steps to catch the bait. “It’s a set of behaviors that ultimately lead him to that goal. It’s problem solving, and it’s problem solving exactly the way humans do,” he said. “We would have done the same thing if we had tried to access that trap from shore.”

Artelle added that although the submerged trap was never visible, the wolf’s actions appeared to be entirely intentional. “It doesn’t pull randomly,” he explained. “He doesn’t look like he’s playing. Anyone who’s had a dog knows what he looks like when he’s playing. He’s so focused. Perfectly efficient. He’s even looking at the end of the line as if he’s predicting when the trap will appear.”

According to Artelle, the wolf’s ability to exhibit this behavior may be related to the conditions found in the Heiltsuk region, one of the few regions in the world where wolves are not intensively hunted or trapped. “The question that arises for us is: Could this behavior evolve here because wolves aren’t as busy looking over their shoulders?”

To use or not to use tools?

First since Jane Goodall documented Following the introduction of tool use by chimpanzees in the 1970s, researchers observed other species exhibiting this complex behavior, including dolphins, elephants, birds, and—at a basic level—even some insects.

Artelle said he believed the wolf’s action qualified as tool use, but acknowledged that was a subjective assessment. “Some definitions say that tool use means using an object outside of you to achieve a goal, which this clearly is,” he said. “But others say you have to build the device somehow. So in this case, he didn’t attach the rope to the crab trap. It was already built for him.”

But if a human did what the wolf did, no one would hesitate to call it tool use, Artelle added. “We can’t sit there and say, ‘He didn’t create the crab trap, so he doesn’t exhibit tool use.’ I didn’t design this laptop I’m using now; we use a lot of tools that we didn’t make ourselves.”

Marc Bekoff, an animal behavior expert and professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, agrees with Artelle’s assessment. The study opens the door to adding more animals to the ever-growing list of tool-using species, Bekoff said. “Future research will answer questions about whether other wolves have also learned to tether and whether this behavior is culturally transmitted in this population,” Bekoff, who was not involved in the research, added in an email.

However, to have true tool use, the object must be manipulated or manipulated in some way, according to Bradley Smith, a senior lecturer in psychology at Central Queensland University in Australia. “This is not a traditional or sophisticated example of tool use, and in my opinion probably should not be described as tool use,” Smith, who was not involved in the research, wrote in an email. He added that this should not overshadow the fact that the wolf’s action is an impressive and clear example of high-level problem solving and thinking, as well as a glimpse into the hidden world of nature and wolves.

Ultimately, fighting about labels is fruitless because labels reflect arbitrary definitions, said Alex Kacelnik, a professor emeritus of behavioral ecology at the University of Oxford in England, who was not involved in the research. “This is a very nice set of observations, and the authors do a great job of addressing its possible significance,” Kacelnik wrote in an email.

“What matters is how the behavior is acquired and what controls it once it is acquired. As the authors correctly emphasize, people never fully ‘understand’ the physics of what they are doing, but they know from experience what works.”

The study was published November 17 in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

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