A wolf was filmed pulling bait out of a submerged crab trap — with some experts howling with glee that it could be the first documented evidence of the beasts using tools.

The female wolf was recently caught on camera wading into the ocean off a British Columbia, Canada beach to grab the buoy of a herring-filled trap sunken well below the waves and completely out of sight.

Once the canine had the buoy its teeth, she swam back to shore and hauled on its line until the crab trap was beached.

The female wolf was filmed pulling the bait-filled crab trap out of deep water off a British Columbia beach. HaÃÉ«zaqv Wolf & Diversity Project

She then tore into it with her snout until she got her paws on the delicious fillet of fish within.

“It’s a sequence of behaviors that ultimately gets her towards that goal. It’s problem-solving, and it’s problem-solving exactly the way humans do it,” said Kyle Artelle, assistant State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry and coauthor of a November study published in Ecology and Evolution.

“We would have done the exact same thing if we were trying to access that trap from shore,” he told CNN.

Artelle was called to the scene after crab traps set up by an environmental program run by the indigenous Heiltsuk Nation kept turning up on shore and stripped of their bait — leaving people baffled because the traps were sunk too deep for scavenging wolves or bears to get their claws on them.

A research team expected marine mammals like seals or otters could be the culprits, and set up motion-activated triggers near some traps to catch the critters in the act.

But that’s not what they found — and they were stunned.

The wolf deliberately retrieved the trap’s buoy so she could haul on a line until the bait was drawn within reach. HaÃÉ«zaqv Wolf & Diversity Project

“We were amazed. It was not what we were expecting, to say the least,” Artelle said of the moment his team first watched the wolf in action.

“Folks who are lucky enough to spend time around wolves know they’re super smart, so the fact that they’re capable of doing highly intelligent things, in and of itself, isn’t surprising,” he added. “But this kind of behavior has not been seen before.”

And Artelle thinks the behavior constitutes never-before-seen tool use from the species.

“She isn’t randomly pulling,” he said. “This is very focused. She is being perfectly efficient. She’s even staring at the end of the line as if in anticipation of when that trap is going to show up.”

Definitions for tool use among non-humans vary, and have been widely debated since Jane Goodall first recorded apes using twigs to dig and fish for insects in the 1970s.

Since then, numerous animals — from dolphins down to ants — have been observed engaged in the behavior that scientists for centuries thought was the domain of humanity alone.

HaÃÉ«zaqv Wolf & Diversity Project

“Some definitions say tool use means the use of an object external to yourself to achieve a goal, which this clearly is,” Artell told CNN.

“But others say that you need to construct the tool in some way. So, in this instance, she didn’t tie the line to the crab trap. It was already built for her.”

But he thinks if a human were filmed fishing from those traps in the same way nobody would think twice about saying they were using tools.

“We wouldn’t sit there and say, ‘She didn’t create the crab trap, so she’s not really exhibiting tool use.’ I didn’t construct this laptop that I’m using right now; we use a lot of tools that we don’t construct ourselves,” he said.

Other experts have agreed with Artelle, but some aren’t convinced — with critics arguing tool use requires an object being specifically obtained and manipulated to bring about a result.

“It’s not a traditional or advanced example of tool use, and for me, probably shouldn’t be defined as tool use,” Central Queensland University psychology lecturer Bradley Smith told CNN.

It remains unclear if the wolf filmed is the only one that’s pulled off the feat.

Another wolf in the area was filmed trying to get at one of the crab traps, but the footage didn’t show whether it finished the job.