Name: Researchers stunned as wolves seen pulling crab trap lines from water
Uploaded: 2025-11-19T07:48:12.766Z
Duration: 2 min
Description: Wolf researchers who looked at wolves in the Heiltsuk First Nation have observed a scientific first. Evidence of possible tool use by wolves. The researchers set up cameras in front of some crab traps near Bella Bella to find out what was damaging them.

Wolf researchers who looked at wolves in the Heiltsuk First Nation have observed a scientific first. Evidence of possible tool use by wolves. The researchers set up cameras in front of some crab traps near Bella Bella to find out what was damaging them.

British Columbia

Researchers in British Columbia were surprised to discover video footage of a wolf pulling a crab trap from the water and accessing the bait inside. The footage was obtained during green crab monitoring efforts led by the Heiltsuk Nation, who had been investigating repeated damage to their traps.

The researchers initially suspected smaller animals such as mink or seals, as the traps are typically submerged and not easily accessible to large mammals. However, a remote camera revealed that a wolf was able to retrieve the trap by pulling the line, demonstrating a sequence of actions similar to those performed by humans.

Researchers stunned as wolves seen pulling crab trap lines from water

Yeah, I mean, our jaws dropped. It was not what we were expecting to see, to say the least. So the video's a pretty striking behavior where we see this wolf. She has a float in her mouth. She brings the float to shore, drops it on the ground, picks up a line, pulls on the line, sort of brings the line up shore, pulling on it, and then you slowly start to see this crab trap emerge out of the water. And then she goes to the crab trap, brings it to shore, and proceeds to break open the bait cup within and eat the bait that was in the crab trap. So the background to this is the Hitchcock Nation leads green crab monitoring and research in the territory. Green crabs are this terrible, very impactful invasive species that's going up the Pacific and is very much establishing in Bella Bella and Hitchcock territory more broadly. So the nation was doing this green crab trapping and kept finding traps were getting damaged. So they'd get there in the morning to pull the traps and they'd find that the netting was torn, the bait cup was often missing. So the question was, well, who's doing this then? You know, if the trap is always underwater, a bear or a wolf, as far as we know, wouldn't be able to dive down for it. They don't tend to scuba dive. And we happened to have a remote camera that we were able to set up. We said, why don't we put one of these remote cameras, point it at one of these crab traps and just see if we can get some kind of inkling who's doing this. We had no idea. We thought maybe we'd see a mink in the area. Maybe we'd see a seal. Maybe it would give us a hint as to what's going on. But when we got back, when the camera came back a week later and we opened it up in Bella Bella and we saw this behavior, it's one of these cases where the video really speaks for itself. It really just shows this wolf, at least apparently showing quite a bit of understanding of how this trap works, of doing a sequence of behaviors and of pulling the trap up exactly the way that we would, right? She is doing this exactly as a person would.

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