Animal Intelligence: What We Might Expect — and What Surprises Us

But here’s one such controversy that is actually fun:

At Science News, Elie Dolgin reports on a West Coast wolf who found an unexpected way to break into a crab trap and steal the bait:

Haíɫzaqv Guardians had noticed many crab traps dragged onto the beach, their netting mangled and bait missing. The wardens initially thought marine mammals might be to blame. Or maybe bears. Remote cameras not only revealed the real culprit, but also later captured similar, less conclusive glimpses of the same behavior in additional wolves.

Whether this qualifies as tool use, however, remains a matter of debate.

“The definition is pretty elastic,” says Artelle’s coauthor Paul Paquet, an ecologist from the University of Victoria in Canada. He argues that the wolf’s deliberate pulling of the buoy line — a multistep process involving repeated trips into the water to haul in the rope, tug by steady tug, until the trap surfaced — meets the spirit, if not the strict letter, of the term.

But Benjamin Beck, a former curator at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C., who wrote the 1980 textbook codifying the scientific definition of animal tool behavior, says it falls short.

“A wolf raided a crab trap. Was it tool use or just canine cunning?,” November 17, 2025. The paper is open access.

The controversy among researchers here has reified animal tool use; it has become a thing in itself. The wolf can’t just be a smart canine; it has to show tool use. Underlying such a quest is often an implicit effort to demonstrate an intelligence continuum that rolls out gradually from grabbing crab bait through to the James Webb Space Telescope.

In reality, there is no continuum. There is an unbridgeable gap between wanting a meal and wanting to know if we are alone in the cosmos. A great many animals show considerable intelligence but they never cross that gap.

The tool use question is tricky because some differences between what animals can or can’t do with tools derive from physiology. Surely, one reason that canines don’t typically use tools on their own is that their digits are not well suited to manipulating objects — as extensions of digits — the way humans do.

Dogs can be taught, with much effort, by humans to manipulate objects. They can even learn to drive a car, with much training. But that isn’t where canines naturally excel.

A Deeper Question

A deeper question arises when life forms adopt an intelligent strategy that the individuals or colony are unlikely to have thought of for themselves. At ZME Science, Mihai Andrei reports on a trick that a parasitic ant queen uses: Releasing pheromones that cause the ants of a colony she is parasitizing to kill their own queen:

The victims are the established colonies of Lasius flavus and Lasius japonicus. They’re your standard, hard-working subterranean ants. The villains are the queens of Lasius orientalis and Lasius umbratus. These species are “temporary social parasites”. They don’t build their own colonies from scratch. Instead, a newly mated queen seeks out an established nest, infiltrates it, and seeks to replace the sitting queen….

The parasitic queen approaches the resident mother covertly. She gets close, turns her abdomen toward the target, and unleashes a spray of fluid. This isn’t just a splash of water. The fluid is delivered from the acidopore, a specialized opening found in Formicinae ants, and it is almost certainly formic acid.

The spray doesn’t kill the host queen immediately. Instead, it acts as a “mark for death.” The host workers, the queen’s own daughters, suddenly turn on her. Agitated by the chemical cocktail, they launch an abrupt and vicious attack on their own mother. The parasitic queen, having lit the fuse, wisely retreats. She stands back and watches as the workers swarm the queen, biting and stinging her until she is dead.

“Parasitic Queens Trick Ant Daughters into Murdering Their Own Mothers,” November 18, 2025. The paper is open access.

 At Science, Phie Jacobs notes: 

The invading queen ant first avoids suspicion by mingling with host workers, [Keizo] Takasuka found, cloaking herself with the characteristic scents of the colony. After locating the host queen, the usurper douses her with multiple jets of a foul-smelling abdominal fluid. This substance likely contains formic acid, Takasuka explains, which masks the queen’s natural odor and makes her smell like an enemy—thus transforming her “from mother to menace,” he says.

While the intruder beats a hasty retreat, the host queen’s subjects attack and dispose of their queen. Then the parasitic queen returns to lay eggs and take control of the workers, who serve the new queen until they die.

“This parasitic ant tricks workers into killing their own queen.”

It is noted at ZME Science that “The study highlights that this specific strategy — using a chemical spray to incite matricide — has likely evolved independently in different lineages of ants.” But such convergent evolution only makes the puzzle more difficult. How could a life form like an ant — not known for creative or independent thinking as such but rather for a hive mind — “evolve” such a strategy?

It seems just as likely that, as some physicists have suggested, there is a realm of pure information underlying the universe, which life forms are sometimes tapping into. If that seems implausible, it is surely much more implausible that different ant species simply tumbled to all this at various times.

Denyse O’Leary is a freelance journalist based in Victoria, Canada. Specializing in faith and science issues, she has published two books on the topic: Faith@Science and By Design or by Chance? She has written for publications such as The Toronto Star, The Globe & Mail, and Canadian Living. She is co-author, with neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul. She received her degree in honors English language and literature.

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