Sea wolves filmed hauling crab traps ashore — a surprising display of learning and tool use

What began as a local mystery in coastal British Columbia turned into a striking example of animal ingenuity. For more than a year, members of the Heiltsuk First Nation and conservation teams found crab traps washed ashore, chewed and emptied of bait. Remote cameras deployed to investigate finally revealed the culprit: coastal or "sea" wolves swimming out, biting floats, and hauling trap lines ashore to retrieve the bait.

Researchers working with the Haíɫzaqv Guardians captured footage in 2023 that shows a wolf seizing a bright float in her teeth, dragging it onto the beach to gain leverage, and tugging the rope with a series of quick, deliberate pulls until the trap surfaced. She then opened the bait cup and fed herself. The behaviour was efficient and focused, consistent with ecologist Kyle Artelle’s description of it as "highly efficient and focused behaviour." Artelle and co-author Paul Paquet published the observations in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

Context: invasive crabs and community monitoring

The research grew from a long-term collaboration between scientists and the Heiltsuk community of Bella Bella, which has battled an invasion of European green crabs for more than a decade. Introduced to California decades ago, green crabs have advanced northward, damaging clam beds and eelgrass nurseries for juvenile fish. Local habitat stressors — including the legacy of a diesel spill — have helped the invasive crabs establish themselves.

As part of a monitoring and mitigation programme, the Haíɫzaqv Guardians deploy specially designed traps in intertidal zones and place additional traps in deeper water, marking those locations with brightly coloured floats. Beginning in 2023, teams began recovering traps with teeth marks and missing bait. Suspecting otters or seals for the deeper losses, the Guardians and researchers set remote cameras to find the true culprits.

Behaviour, learning and implications

The captured footage suggests this is a learned sequence of actions rather than instinctive behaviour. The wolf performs the steps with efficiency — locating the float, securing it with her teeth, hauling the line to shore, and opening the bait cup — which indicates fast learning and likely social transmission within the pack. "You can see the efficiency with which she moves through the traps," Artelle said. "This isn’t genetic. This is an entirely learned behaviour, and learned very fast, and likely shared among the group."

These wolves — often referred to as coastal or sea wolves — are already known to rely heavily on marine resources such as salmon, shellfish and seals. In much of British Columbia wolves may be treated as nuisance predators and hunted, but the Heiltsuk community’s approach is different: through the Haíɫzaqv Wolf and Biodiversity Project they do not hunt the local packs and instead live alongside them. That local coexistence may give wolves more opportunities to develop novel behaviours where human activities and wildlife overlap.

“We couldn’t believe our eyes. It was serendipity that we actually captured this behaviour. And it was, quite simply, inspiring,” said Artelle. “This just gives us a new dimension of what it can mean to be a wolf and raises a larger question: what else can they do?”

Beyond solving a local mystery, the observation broadens our understanding of wolf cognition and behavioural flexibility. It also highlights how community-led monitoring and respectful coexistence can reveal surprising interactions between humans and wildlife — and why protecting those local relationships matters for science and conservation.