The footage lasts just under three minutes. A wolf swims from a rocky shoreline on the central coast of British Columbia, grabs a floating buoy in its jaws and turns toward the beach. What he is towing is not visible from the surface: a baited crab trap, completely submerged, tied to the buoy by a piece of rope. She drags all the equipment to the rocks, then works the trap net until she reaches the bait container inside. The sequence was captured by underwater, motion-activated cameras that researchers had installed to monitor traps used to capture invasive European green crabs, in the territory of the Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) Nation, near Bella Bella. It is described in a paper published in the journal Ecology and Evolution in November 2025, written by Kyle Artelle, who holds a joint appointment in SUNY’s Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Forestry and Heiltsuk’s Department of Integrated Resource Management, and Raincoast Conservation Foundation scientist Paul Paquet, in collaboration with Haíɫzaqv Guardians and University of Alberta researchers who helped with the broader monitoring effort. The title of the article covers its own claim: “Potential tool use by wolves.” That coverage, the potential, matters, because what outside experts do with the images turns out to be genuinely divided. What actually caught on camera The main incident was recorded on May 29, 2024. A female wolf swam in water deep enough that the trap was not visible from the shore, located the buoy and pulled the connected rope and trap back to the beach, where she broke the net to catch the herring and bait from the inland sea lions. A second, less conclusive event involving a different wolf was recorded in February 2025. Researchers who reviewed the footage described the animal’s behavior as concentrated rather than accidental. “We were amazed. It wasn’t what we expected, to say the least,” Artelle told CNN. “It’s problem solving, and it’s problem solving exactly the way humans do.” William Housty, hereditary chief of Haíɫzaqv and director of the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department, put the visual comparison clearly to Global News: “You normally imagine a human being with two hands pulling a crab trap.” Whether this counts as tool use in the strict sense that biologists apply to primates or corvids is a separate question, and one the authors of the paper do not attempt to definitively resolve. Bradley Smith, a canine behavior researcher at Central Queensland University who was not involved in the study, told CNN it was not “a traditional or advanced example of tool use” as the wolf did not make or set the connection between the rope and the trap; It exploited a bond that people had already built. Marc Bekoff, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, offered Science the opposite reading: “If it had been a chimpanzee or another non-human primate, I’m sure no one would have batted an eyelid at whether it was tool use.” An old pattern with a new twist It is already known that wolves along this stretch of coast, often called sea lions in the research literature that has built up around them since the 2000s, largely feed on the ocean rather than the forest. Work by researchers at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation and the University of Victoria found that these wolves can obtain up to 90 percent of their diet from marine sources overall, with salmon runs alone accounting for about a quarter; the rest comes from stranded whale carcasses, intertidal invertebrates, and seal remains washed ashore. The images of crab traps add a new method of obtaining food, not a new food source. Salmon in a stream or a seal carcass at the tide line does not require solving a mechanical problem. A trap tied to a rope, placed on the sea floor and with the opening pointing in the wrong direction, does. The wolf in the footage had to find the buoy, connect it correctly to the submerged object it couldn’t see, and then overcome the trap net once it was on land. The researchers frame this as an extension of the known foraging flexibility in unfamiliar terrain, rather than evidence of an entirely separate cognitive ability. One confirmed case, with a second weaker case from a different individual, is not enough to say how common this behavior is among the general population, or whether it has been socially learned among wolves. The authors of the article are explicit that they are reporting an observation, not an established pattern of behavior. What happens next with the traps? The invasive green crab program that placed the cameras there continues regardless of what the wolves do with the equipment. But the footage has already changed the way at least one research team thinks about camera placement, since a raid on a submerged trap was not something anyone had anticipated in their monitoring protocol. Whether other coastal wolf populations, or other individuals within it, ever repeat the behavior is an open question that researchers say they will keep an eye on while the network of cameras monitoring green crab traps remains in place. 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