These BC wolves figured out how to uproot crab traps to get food
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Researchers have captured video footage of wild wolves in British Columbia pulling a crab trap out to sea through its lines to feed on bait, in the first evidence of possible tool use by the animals.
A Report released on Monday Researchers Kyle Artell and Paul Paquette say in the scientific journal Ecology & Evolution that they placed cameras on Heiltsuk First Nation crab traps on the beach to find out what was repeatedly harming them.
Traps set near Bella Bella on B.C.’s central coast were being used to control the invasive European green crab, and some were submerged in deep water at all times, leading researchers to believe the damage that began in 2023 was caused by the marine mammals.
“We were going, ‘Well, what is it doing, right?'” said Artel, a researcher at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry who was involved in the Heiltsuk Nation’s efforts to respond to the green crabs.
“It can’t be a bear, a wolf. They won’t dive down to reach the trap. So, what’s the point of getting a trap?”
In this video footage from researchers Kyle Artell and Paul Paquette, sea wolves in central BC are seen pulling up crab traps — what researchers say may be the first use of tools by the species.
His assumptions were wrong.
Within a day of the cameras being installed in May last year, researchers captured footage of a sea wolf emerging from the water with a buoy hanging over its mouth.
The footage showed the wolf dropping the buoy on the beach, picking up the exposed line and pulling it until the crab trap was out of the water.
Then the wolf picked up the net with his mouth, took it to shallow water and ate the bait inside.
“We had to pick our jaws off the floor,” Artel said.
“We know they’re really, really smart, but it didn’t occur to us that, oh, maybe a wolf is swimming into the deep net and bringing the buoy to shore, pulling the line up like a person.”
The cameras then captured a second sea wolf dragging a crab trap in a similar manner earlier this year, leading researchers to believe that other wolves in the local pack may have learned from each other.
Sea wolves are a subspecies of the gray wolf known for their marine-based diet.
As to how this behavior began, Artel said researchers can only speculate.
“We don’t know ultimately, but we have two most likely explanations in our minds, one would be that wolves started doing this with traps exposed at low tide because it’s really easy,” Artel said.
“It might be incremental learning starting with the net completely on shore, moving to a partially submerged net, then attaching the line to the net, and then attaching the buoy to the line… That would make a lot of sense, and that’s often how we learn.”
Researchers say some cameras at the BC site are now dedicated to crab traps 24/7 to monitor the behavior of sea wolves in the area, while work is “in progress” to protect the traps from causing too much damage that could disrupt studies of the invasive crab.
“There are really some special things happening here, and we want to understand more about it. What else is happening on the ground? What else do these wolves have to teach us? And so that’s what we’ll be focusing on for the next decades.” Learn more about wolves Here,” Artel said.
“This is really just the tip of the iceberg.”
Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said the paper was exciting — pointing to groundbreaking research such as jane goodall In the use of tools by other mammals such as chimpanzees.
“It adds another element to the package that wolves are incredibly intelligent. They’re extremely adaptive animals,” Bekoff, who was not involved in the study, told CBC News.
