Wolves in the wild are caught on video seemingly using 'tools' to get food

On the central coast of British Columbia, fishers use crab traps on the seafloor, with ropes that run up to floating buoys. Along that stretch of shoreline, a wild coastal wolf began to interact with that gear in a manner that resembled how a person would use a tool.

Wolves usually hunt deer, fish, or other prey, not equipment designed by humans. Watching a wolf calmly work with a buoy, a rope, and a metal trap surprised the people who tend those waters and the scientists who later studied the footage.

Wolves, tools, and crab traps

Before anyone saw the wolf in action, people kept finding crab traps in rough shape. Some traps had torn netting. The bait was gone from others, and heavy gear sometimes turned up in shallow water or even on the beach.

Storms, strong currents, seals, otters, and bears all seemed like possible culprits, yet the pattern did not match any obvious cause.

Some of the raided traps never left the water, even when the tide dropped. That detail meant something had to reach them while they stayed completely submerged.

To get a clearer picture of what was happening, local guardians of the coastline teamed up with researchers and set up a camera to watch over a set of traps and their buoys.

Caught on video

The recording that became the core of a scientific study shows a wild coastal wolf swimming in from offshore and heading straight for one buoy.

The wolf bites the buoy, drags it onto shore, turns back toward the water, seizes the rope in its jaws, and walks backward until the rope hauls the trap up from the seafloor into the shallows.

Once the trap reaches the beach, the wolf works at the bait container, rips it out, and eats the contents.

The video captures a multi-step behavior focused on one clear goal: using human-made equipment in a way that looks deliberate rather than like random trial and error.

The video footage was captured by University of Alberta master’s student Milène Wiebe and guardian Richard Cody Reid. “Woah,” Artelle recalls thinking. “We were not expecting that.”

Arguing over wolves “tool use”

After watching that sequence, scientists asked a simple question with a complicated answer: does this count as “tool use”?

Biologists do not all agree on a single definition, but a common one says an animal uses a tool when it intentionally manipulates an external object to reach a goal, such as getting food or solving a problem.

“The behavior is really impressive,” says Bradley Smith, a comparative psychologist at Central Queensland University who has documented tool use in captive dingoes.

The wolf displays cognitive sophistication “that we often reserve for primates, elephants, and crows,” Smith continued.

Some researchers argue that true tool use should involve changing or arranging the object itself, by shaping it or placing it in a special position.

Under that stricter definition, some scientists see rope-pulling as “just” exploiting something that already happens to be in a useful position.

Because of this, the authors do not loudly declare, “This is definitely tool use!” Instead, they describe the behavior as sitting near the edge of current definitions.

That choice pushes experts to ask whether long-standing labels pay too much attention to famous species such as primates and crows.

Curious coastal wolves

The study takes place in Haíɫzaqv territory on the central coast. There, wolves experience relatively low persecution compared with many other regions, so they are not constantly fleeing from people or vehicles.

In a safer setting like that, animals may have more mental “space” to explore, experiment, repeat unusual behaviors, and, through repeated practice, turn a rare action such as hauling crab gear by rope into a stable foraging strategy.

Coastal wolves in this part of the world already spend much of their time near the ocean, eating salmon from seasonal runs, shellfish, and other shoreline foods, and they swim easily between islands.

Human fishing gear, from crab traps to nets and lines, lies scattered through the same waters. That overlap gives curious wolves chances to encounter ropes, buoys, and baited equipment.

It happened more than once

The evidence in this case does not rest on a single lucky video. Many of the damaged traps in the area turned up in places that wolves could reach by swimming or wading.

Researchers later recorded another clip of a wolf interacting with partly submerged gear in a different way.

Together, these patterns suggest that wolves there sometimes focus intentionally on traps and that at least one animal has mastered a rope-and-buoy technique that looks quite advanced for a wild canid in its natural habitat.

Cautious conclusions and observations

The authors do not say that all wolves everywhere can perform this behavior or show that this type of tool use spreads like a “culture” through a whole pack. They also cannot estimate how often it occurs when no one is watching.

What they can report is solid evidence that at least one wild wolf in this coastal ecosystem repeatedly carried out a complex, ordered sequence to reach food inside human fishing gear.

That careful wording matters because scientists prefer to build conclusions slowly from unusual events instead of jumping to big claims about a species.

A single clever wolf does not prove that every wolf has the same tool skills. Instead, it adds a data point to the larger picture of how flexible carnivore behavior can be when animals live in rich environments full of both natural prey and human-made objects.

Wolves, tools, and animal intelligence

This study asks us to rethink how we talk about wolf intelligence, which is usually described in terms of pack hunts, communication, and territory defense.

In the video, the animal comes across as a problem-solver that shows persistence, links cause and effect across several steps, and patiently carries out a sequence that only pays off once the trap reaches shore and the bait cup finally comes free.

The study also widens the conversation about animal “tool use” beyond the usual cases.

“Nonhuman animals, especially wolves, are operating with cognitive and emotional complexity that science is only beginning to map,” Smith says. “Behaviors like this challenge us to rethink the mental lives of animals and how we treat them.”

The full study was published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

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