Underestimate the Reasoning Potential of Animals

A wild wolf on BC’s coast. Credit: Heiltsuk First Nation and Kyle Artelle

 

"I couldn't believe my eyes when we opened up that camera."

"This wolf showed  up and she just saw a float and she knew the float was attached to a trap. [It was] incredible behaviour."

"She knew how to pull the trap up. She knew if she pulled the trap onto the beach, she could get food...

"Really intelligent, really incredible, sophisticated behaviour. Bears and wolves do swim, but as far as we know, they don’t dive."

"We ultimately don't know, but the two most likely explanations in our minds, one would be that the wolves started doing this with traps that were exposed at a low tide because that's really easy."

"There might've been this incremental learning that started with the trap fully onshore to traps partly submerged, to then associating the line with the trap and then the buoy with the line … It would make a lot of sense, and that's often how we learn."

"Some really special things are happening here, and we want to understand more about that. What else is happening on the ground? What else do these wolves have to teach us? And so that's a focus for the next decades as we explore more about wolves here."

"This is really just the tip of the iceberg." 

Kyle Artelle, environmental biologist, State University of New York   

 

Researchers in British Columbia have discovered wild wolf behaviour that has taken them aback in its unexpectedness. A lesson in how even animal behaviourists and other biologists studying the behaviour of animals in the wild underappreciate in their understanding of the level of intelligence and capable maneuvering of various species in the interests of survival and their never-ending search for sources of food. An episode that revealed itself to researchers recently serves to illustrate the point.

 

The invasive species of European green crabs in the waters off British Columbia occasioned traps being put out, submerged deeply in the coastal water located in a remote area of British Columbia for years. The eradication program saw an intervening and puzzling episode when traps that were placed deep offshore began appearing on the shore, seriously tampered with, bait removed, their living contents absent. Who or what had dragged those traps ashore was a mystery.

 

Interference with the project with which the local Heiltsuk First Nation was involved, was a puzzler. The researchers and the First Nation were faced with a dilemma; traps that had been positioned in deep water, never exposed during low tide were being vandalized and the thought of a marine predator being the perpetrator -- however unimaginable -- was uppermost in mind. They resorted to an obvious solution with the purpose of observing a suspected scenario in action by setting out a closed circuit camera which soon revealed the source of the mystery.

 

A video resulted that more than adequately explained that the culprit (or culprits) involved was a female wolf committing  herself to dive into the water to retrieve the traps with their caught cargo of tasty green crabs. What the scientists saw astonished them; a wolf making use of tools and a sophisticated set of reasoned actions to retrieve the traps and feast on their contents. The female wolf was seen swimming to the buoy's located and dragging it along with the trap attached to it, to shore. 

"What it is is very sophisticated behaviour. What we see is a wolf who is bringing a float to shore, she can’t see the traps there, but she brings the float to shore, she knows that float is attached to a rope, she pulls on the rope, it’s attached to a trap, if she pulls that in sequence she can bring the trap to within her reach, then she can bring the trap to shore and then based on that she can access the bait within."

"It’s the kind of behaviour that is really familiar to us. She is solving the problem the same way that we would."

Kyle Artelle 

The line attached to the trap was tugged until it brought the trap to shore and once there, she purposefully chewed through the netting to take possession of the bait, and presumably the crabs for which the bait was intended. Geographer Paul Paquet of the University of Victoria, involved with the research team, marvelled at the wild wolf's feat of intelligent reasoning and follow-up activities, while admitting they had no idea how common such reasoning feats might be in the wild.

 

But having studied the incident as closely as they could and surmising that area wolves in that remote region had the leisure to make experiments of that nature, with no natural enemies to restrict and distract them -- including hunters -- wrote  up a paper which saw publication in the journal Ecology and Evolution. The wolf, they noted, likely attempted a variety of approaches to avail itself of the coveted prize, and through trial and error found the winning formula in a practised series of reasoned steps. 

 

This image from the researchers' videos shows how exactly the wolves pulled up the traps. (Submitted by Kyle Artelle and Paul Paquet)

 

"Our crews came in and said that, you know, something had been pulling our crab traps and taking the bait."

"You normally picture a human being with two hands pulling a crab trap, but we couldn’t figure out exactly what had the ability to be able to do that until we put a camera up and saw, well, there’s other intelligent beings out there that are able to do this, which is very remarkable."

"Our crew have gone through hundreds of bait traps, you know, trying to catch these green crabs and getting intercepted by this pack of wolves, so it’s quite remarkable that they’ve been able to pick up on and be able to do it."

William Housty, director, Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department, Bella Bella