A female 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-observed behavior that may represent the first documented use of tools by a wolf.
The traps were set by the Heiltsuks (Khayzakv) The Nation as part of an Indigenous-led environmental program. The program is focused in part on combating the spread of the European green crab, an invasive species that is destroying local ecosystems.
“The traps started to get damaged, and the damage really looked like it could have been a bear or a wolf,” said Kyle Artel, an assistant professor in the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry and co-author of the new study. study about the opening.
“For traps located in shallow water, it makes sense – a bear or wolf could just walk up to them. But some of them were in very deep water and were not exposed even at low tide. The assumption was that it couldn't have been a bear or a wolf because they don't dive. So, who could it be?”
To find out, the researchers set up motion-sensing cameras, thinking they might spot an otter or a seal. Instead, one of the cameras captured the she-wolf swimming towards the shore with a buoy in her mouth before dropping it onto the sand. She then grabbed the rope attached to the buoy and pulled it until the trap emerged from the water. The animal continued to drag the trap towards the shore until it was in shallow water, and then opened the canister with the bait – a piece of herring.
“We were amazed. It wasn't what we expected, to say the least,” Artell said. “People who are lucky enough to spend time around wolves know that they are very smart, so the fact that they are able to do very smart things is not surprising in itself. But this type of behavior has not been observed before.”
Focused action, not play
The researchers don't know how many wolves learned this behavior, but they did film another interaction between another wolf and a trap. However, this recording did not show whether this wolf retrieved the fully submerged canister.
Artell said he thinks the wolves may have learned about the traps by seeing people throwing them off boats, or they may have gained access to a trap that was in shallow water due to low tide and then figured out how to reach deeper and deeper traps.
What's notable about the interaction is that the wolf had to take a series of steps to get to the bait, Artel said. “It's a sequence of actions that will ultimately lead her to that goal. It's problem solving, and it's problem solving just like people do,” he said. “We would do the same thing if we tried to access this trap from shore.”
The wolf's actions also appear to be completely intentional, despite the fact that the submerged trap is not visible at all, Artel added. “She’s pulling for a reason,” he explained. “It doesn't look like she's playing. Anyone who has a dog knows what she looks like when she's playing. She's very focused. She's completely efficient. She even looks to the back of the line, as if waiting for that trap to appear.”
According to Artell, 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 hunted or trapped. “The question this raises for us is: Could this behavior evolve here because wolves aren't as concerned about having to look over their shoulders?”
Should I use the tool or not?
Since Jane Goodall first documented The use of chimpanzee tools in the 1970s allowed chimpanzees to observe other species exhibiting these complex behaviors, including dolphins, elephants, birds and—at a basic level—even some insects.
Artel said he believes the wolf's actions qualify as tool use, but acknowledges that is a subjective assessment. “Some definitions say that tool use means using an object external to you to achieve a goal, which it obviously is,” he said. “But others say the tool has to be constructed somehow. So in this case, she didn't tie the line to the crab pot. It was already built for her.”
However, if a man did what the wolf did, no one would hesitate to call it using a tool, Artel added. “We wouldn't sit there and say, 'She didn't create a crab trap, so she doesn't actually demonstrate tool use.' I didn’t create this laptop that I use now; We use a lot of tools that we don’t create ourselves.”
Mark Bekoff, an animal behavior expert and professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado Boulder, agrees with Artel's assessment. The research, Bekoff noted, opens up the possibility of adding new animals to the growing list of tool-using species. “Future studies will answer questions about whether other wolves learn to use a rope and whether this behavior is culturally transmitted among this population,” added Bekoff, who was not involved in the study, in an email.
However, according to Bradley Smith, senior lecturer in psychology at Central Queensland University in Australia, for the tool to be fully used, the object must be oriented or modified in some way. “This is not a traditional or advanced example of tool use, and in my opinion it probably should not be defined as tool use,” Smith, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email. “This should not detract from the fact that the wolf's actions are 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, fighting labels is futile because they reflect arbitrary definitions, says Alex Katzelnik, emeritus professor of behavioral ecology at the University of Oxford in England, who was also not involved in the study. “This is a wonderful set of observations, and the authors do a great job of uncovering its possible significance,” Kacelnik wrote in an email.
“What matters is how behavior is acquired and what controls it once it is acquired. As the authors rightly point out, people 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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