THE NEW YORK TIMES – Where temperate rainforest meets the Pacific Ocean near Bella Bella, British Columbia, the Heiltsuk, a Canadian First Nation whose name is often rendered as Haíɫzaqv, have worked to contain a European green crab problem in their territory.
In 2021, the nation’s Guardian program, which stewards the nation’s traditional lands and waters, began setting traps to remove this invasive species.
But the traps, simple circular, netted frames baited with plastic cups of herring or chopped sea lion, were repeatedly and puzzlingly being torn apart.
Some broken traps lay in deep water, never exposed at low tide.
Credit…K.A. Partelle and P.C. Paquet, Ecology and Evolution, 2025
They thought, “Maybe it’s otters, maybe it’s mink, maybe it’s seals, but we didn’t know,” said Kyle Artelle, an ecologist at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry who works with the Heiltsuk Nation.
To identify the crab trap crook, Milène Wiebe, a University of Alberta graduate student, and Richard Cody Reid, a Heiltsuk Guardian, set up a remote camera in May 2024. What they captured on video the day after deployment was neither a marine mammal nor a mustelid.
It was a wolf.
In the footage, the wild canid swims to the shallows from deep water, towing the red and white buoy attached to the trap from her jaws. On a third pull, the trap rises into water shallow enough for her to grasp the trap itself.
Then, tearing through the netting to reach the orange bait cup, she carries it up the beach, places it upright on the pebbles, licks out the sea lion strips, checks for scraps, gobbles them down and then nonchalantly trots off.
read more [subscription may be required]
