The coast of British Columbia is experiencing a crab problem . But trying to control the crab problem appears to have surfaced an unexpected wolf problem—one that reveals the surprising capacity of wolves as intelligent crab thieves.

Researchers set up remote cameras to catch a mysterious crab thief, but they weren’t prepared for the scene that unfolded almost immediately after installing the cameras. They watched, stunned, as a wolf swam out of the water with a crab trap in her mouth. From the video, it looked as though the wolf had a remarkably good understanding of how the trap worked, making it—potentially—the first documented instance of a wolf interacting with tools.

A paper published on November 17 in Ecology and Evolution presents a formal account of this novel behavior. As o

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