Is Tool Use In The Ocean As Rare As We Thought? | Ft Lindsay Nikole

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]The ability to create and use tools was long thought to be a uniquely human trait, setting us apart from animals.

[00:00:07]But this isn't true. Genera across the animal kingdom have been documented using tools, including mammals, birds, fish, sephalopods, and even insects. Sea urchins have been documented using tools. They will pick up shells, rocks, and even other animals and use them as protection against UV rays. like a little sea urchin hat. It's actually really cute. You should check it out.

[00:00:32]While using tools in animals is more common than we previously assumed, it is still relatively rare. Tool use has been documented in less than 1% of the animal genre currently identified and an even smaller percentage of species. So, it's still a pretty big deal when a species displays the ability to craft and use tools. Now, to help explore why manufacturing and using tools is considered a significant evolutionary step, I brought in zoologologist and science communicator Lindsay Nicole.

[00:01:00]>> Hi, Kristen.

[00:01:00]>> If evolutionary sciences are your thing, then you're probably familiar with Lindsay's channel. And if you're not, you should be. In a minute, she's going to guide us through the earliest evidence for tool use in humans that we know of. I'm KP, a marine biologist who has spent over 15 years working with marine mammals like seaars, who are probably the most well-known tool using animals in the ocean. They are famous for using rocks and other tools to smash open the hard shells of clams, muscles, and abalone. Less famous, but no less cute, is how sea otterters use kelp as a tool. They'll often wrap it around themselves like a little seat belt when they sleep so that they won't drift away. Mothers will also use kelp to hold their pups in one place while they go foraging. Like the the original children on leashes. The leash kids. Wasn't that a thing? Leash kids. Yeah.

[00:01:47]>> Yeah. Sea otterters will even use kelp to immobilize their prey. They'll wrap up a crab in kelp and keep it from escaping while they eat their other snacks. Sea otterters will even use the claws of the crab like a can opener to pry open the carropus, which is honestly disrespectful. A recent study found that tools allow sea otterters to access significantly larger oysters, clams, and other prey items. Just look at the size of this abalone. in the first ever video recording of a sea otter using a tool underwater. Using tools like this allows them to spend less time foraging and more time snacking, which happens to be a sea otter's favorite pastime. And it is especially important for sea otter moms, who need that efficiency to raise their pups. It's probably also why the same study found that female sea otterters use tools far more frequently than males do. Although, it might just be because they're smarter. Female sea otterters are also the ones responsible for teaching young seaotter pups how to use tools in what's called vertically social transmission, which is when knowledge, behaviors, skills, or cultural traits are passed down directly from parents to the offspring or from older generations to younger generations within a family lineage. And keep that in mind cuz it's going to come up later.

[00:02:57]Because sea otterters are so dextrous, mischievous, and clever, they were originally suspected of being responsible for a curious case of tool use on Vancouver Island. In 2023, the Coastal First Nations of Vancouver Island led a program to control the invasive European green crab by using specifically designed traps. Many of these traps were placed in deep water and were fully submerged at all times, but something kept breaking into the traps and stealing the bait. To find out who was responsible, remote cameras were aimed at the traps. The culprit turned out to be one of Vancouver Island's sea wolves. These are a unique subspecies of wolves who I talked about in a video you can find linked in the descriptions and right up here. These wolves are fast and powerful swimmers, routinely daring oceanic journeys from island to island, sometimes crossing bodies of water that are 12 km or 7 and 1/2 m wide. These wolves also forage on shellfish like muscles and clams that they dig up with their paws and crack open with their powerful jaws. Up to 90% of a seawolf's diet comes from the ocean, including the bait from human crab traps. Something to keep in mind is that this trap was fully submerged at all times. All that was visible was the buoy. The wolf recognized a multi-step connection between the floating buoy and the bait fully submerged in the out of sight trap. She grabs the buoy to access the rope. then sequentially pulls more and more of the rope until the trap is on the shore and then opens the bait cup.

[00:04:23]The wolf understood that these components could be accessed in sequence to progressively retrieve an unseen trap from the water and obtain the bait. I love watching the process of this animal thinking and looking at what it's doing and analyzing. I love seeing that.

[00:04:38]Obviously, we know animals can think, but like it's just really cool to see some of these processes taking place in a way that is so, you know, so relatable as a human. Observing this behavior was only possible due to the Hildick Guardian program, the only entity that conducts research and monitoring here year round. And I apologize if I'm saying that incorrectly. You can feel free to correct me in the comments. At this point, I think we should take a second to talk about the definition of tool use because that definition is still being debated and revised. Some argue that using an external object to achieve a specific goal with intent is tool use with intent being the key word.

[00:05:15]Other definitions exclude rope pulling as a form of tool use because they are not responsible for the proper and effective orientation of the tool to the incentive. The authors of this paper argue that sophistication of the sequence and the clear intent to access an unseen object qualify this as tool use. And also because pulling the rope is how humans would access the trap. For example, if my brother set the trap, but I pulled it in, did we both use a tool or just my brother? I think this is a great spot to bring in Lindsay Nicole to talk about the earliest evidence for tool use found in humans and why manufacturing and using tools is considered a significant evolutionary step. Take it away, Lindsay. Thanks for having me, Preston. Hi, my name's Lindsay. I'm a zoologologist. I make videos on animals alive and extinct.

[00:06:00]That also includes the history and evolution of our own species, the classic tool users. It turns out the oldest evidence for tool use comes from Lqui in Kenya that we know of. Back in 2011, a group of scientists came across a dry rivered and uncovered a bunch of stone tools half buried in the sediment.

[00:06:16]Up until that point, the oldest tools on record were about 2 and 1/2 million years old. They were thought to have been made by an ancient human species called Homohabilis whose name literally means handyman in Latin. But the tools found in Lumei Kenya were way older, like almost a million years older. Since Homohabilis wasn't around that long ago, some other species must have made them.

[00:06:34]That species might have been something like Oralopythecus, maybe even Paranthropus. There's honestly a lot of options because there were so many other ancient hominins around back then. These weren't humans, at least not in the strictest sense, cuz to be classified as true human, you need to be in the genus Homo. oropythecus and paranthropus weren't in our genus, but they were pretty closely related to us. So maybe the most interesting implication about the lamequian tools is that tool use isn't just limited to our own genus, that it probably existed in closely related species in our evolutionary past. We also know that living non-human primates use tools. You might have seen chimpanzees fishing for termites. We often talk about tool use like it's a massive evolutionary leap forward and one of the defining features of human intelligence. But if so many other animals can do it, like killer whales and sea otterters, is it really that special? Some people now think that tool use on its own isn't that impressive.

[00:07:22]The real test is if an animal not only uses tools, but also makes them. There's a huge difference between using a random rock to smash open a clam and spending hours carefully shaping a piece of stone into a specific tool, like a knife or an axe. Obviously, humans do this, and so did a bunch of our ancestors and close evolutionary relatives. But the jury is still out on whether or not non-human animals can really make tools or if they can just use them. Some primates have been observed making tools. For example, there's actually a group of chimps living in Sagal who make spears to hunt bush babies. Absolutely heinous, but quite impressive nonetheless. And then with some non-primate animals, there's also the corvids. The crows, ravens, jays, magpies, etc. Corvids are well known for being intelligent and using tools. And it turns out some of them actually make tools, too. New Caledonian crows became famous back in the early 2000s when they were observed bending twigs to make hooks. Since the crows modified objects and used them for specific purposes, i.e. catching bugs that counts as making tools, not just using them. More recently, we've discovered that New Calonian crows not only make tools, they can make tools with multiple combinable parts. We call these compound tools. They're a pretty big deal. Until crows showed they could do it, compound tools had only been recorded in apes. We humans do it all the time without really thinking about it. But creating a compound tool requires high levels of operational intelligence, planning, and creativity.

[00:08:41]You need to be able to look at two unrelated objects and think of how you might use them for a specific task. So even though anthropologists usually see tool making as a huge step in our evolution towards modern intelligence, turns out a bunch of other animals can do it, too. Maybe humans aren't quite as unique as we once thought. And actually, I think that's pretty cool. Back to you, Kristen.

[00:09:00]>> Thanks again, Lindsay. Something researchers of animal tool use are looking into is a cultural aspect, which brings me to dolphins, who along with sea otterters are one of the most wellstudied aquatic tool users. One specific example are the bottl-nose dolphins of Shark Bay, Australia. These dolphins have been defined as multicultural because they have different methods of obtaining prey.

[00:09:21]Some dolphins in these waters have learned how to safely beach themselves to catch fish. Others use tools. There are dolphins who use snail shells to scoop up fish, bring them to the surface, and then tip them over almost like a cup or a bowl. The dolphins we're going to focus on are known as the spongers. These dolphins use sea sponges almost like a glove for their beak or their rostrm. It protects their face while they're foraging in the sand. This behavior doesn't come naturally, and like sea otterters using tools, it is passed on from mothers to their offspring almost exclusively through vertically social transmission. A study of mitochondrial DNA, which is DNA that is only inherited from your mother and their mothers, found that the sponge using dolphins all descended from a single female dolphin, a sponging Eve, if you will, as the study put it. Also, I hope it doesn't get confusing for people like the mitochondrial DNA has nothing to do with the passing on of the It's not like they're learning it through the It kind of just like seems confusing like they instinctually knew it because they're that's not what happened. It was the That's just how we know that.

[00:10:23]>> Yeah. Okay. Meaning a single female dolphin learned how to use a sponge as a tool and pass that knowledge down to her offspring who then continue the tradition by passing the knowledge down to their offspring. Most spongers daughters become spongers and some of their sons do too. I hate that phrase though. But there is a significant female bias. Again, similar to sea otterters. Sponging is a time-consuming solitary activity that may not be compatible with the requirement for males. But this hypothesis awaits further investigation. Another example of a potential cultural transmission of tool use are the southern resident killer whales. I've talked about this particular population of orcas on this channel, but if you're new here, the one thing that you should know about the southern residents is that they're the orcas who went viral for wearing salmon on their heads like a hat. And while the salmon hats are a cool cultural fad, they're not the tools we're interested in. In 2024, the southern residents were documented using kelp as a grooming tool. There are a few things that really stand out here. The first is that they weren't just using kelp, but they were modifying the kelp to perform a specific function. They were manufacturing tools.

[00:11:29]The orcas would grab a kelp stock near the holdfast and separate the kelp into a desired length. After fashioning a length of kelp, that whale would then approach a partner, flip the length of the kelp onto their rostrm, and press the kelp against their partner's flank.

[00:11:46]That's the other unusual aspect. The orcas weren't creating and using the tool for themselves. They were using a tool to benefit others. Almost like scratching your partner's back. The median length of contact was over half a minute with the maximum duration being 3 minutes of contact. When contact was broken, the pairs of whales would switch which individual initiated the contact.

[00:12:06]They're taking turns. You scratch my back, I scratch yours in whale. It's believed that this behavior is a form of social kin maintenance. Just like humans, orcas and other animals are constantly shedding skin. Many whales and dolphin species will exfoliate by rubbing against the rocks and other ocean substrate. But this is the only documented case of a potential socially hygienic behavior. It's not believed to be a form of play because the orcas didn't exhibit any play behavior. They weren't chasing each other, playing keep away, or other behaviors typical of objectoriented play. But the nature of these behaviors are still being studied, and they are open to debate. The crux of the debate is what constitutes a tool.

[00:12:46]Earlier, I defined a tool as an external object used with intent to achieve a specific goal. Others argue it is simply a physical object other than the animal's own body. But what about bubbles?

[00:12:59]A 2024 study examined humpback whales using bubble nets to corral prey like krill. They found that bubble nets consisted of internally tangenital rings that were actively regulated by the whales. The number of rings in the net, net size, and depth and the horizontal spacing between neighboring bubbles were all under the whale's control. And on average, the structural elements of bubble nets increase prey intake sevenfold.

[00:13:25]So, this brings us back to what is a tool? Are bubbles a physical object other than the animals own body? Let's bring back Lindsay Nicole and get her take on all this. Okay, so we've already established that tool use is a pretty solid indicator of intelligence in animals, but do the examples we've seen in marine mammals actually count? Tools are generally defined as physical objects, which is the first problem because bubble nets aren't exactly something you can pick up and put down?

[00:13:49]While sea otterters do use stones to crack open shells, wolves drag up crab traps, none of them are actually making those tools. They're just using what's already there. But here's the thing. A lot of marine mammals probably don't make or use tools the way we do because they physically can't. Take a humpback whale as a prime example. 40 ton animals with flippers, no back legs, and a mouth the size of a small f not cursing.

[00:14:12]Sorry. There are 40 ton animals with flippers, no back legs, and a mouth the size of a small car. They are perfectly built for swimming long distances and swallowing up huge mouthfuls of tiny fish and crustaceians. But their bodies aren't exactly optimized for making things. Their lack of hands is an especially obvious limitation when it comes to making tools. But we should also consider that humpbacks generally live out in deep water. If you've ever been scuba diving in the open ocean, you'll know there isn't a whole lot out there to interact with. Props to you if you've done that, by the way, cuz that is terrifying. Anyway, what humpbacks do have to interact with is water, and they use it to their advantage in some genuinely clever ways. Bubble nets might not fit the textbook definition of a tool, but given the physical constraints humpbacks are working with, maybe they should count anyway. The same goes for killer whales. We already know they're insanely intelligent, probably on par with apes, maybe even smarter in some ways. But we can't hold them to the same standard as apes because they are not apes. They have no thumbs, no hands, no way to manipulate objects with any real precision. So, do I think marine mammals use tools? Yes. Do I think there are limitations on what kinds of tools they can use and create? Also, yes. And honestly, I take comfort in that. Killer whales are arguably terrifying animals, but at least their lack of thumbs means they probably won't be taking over the world anytime soon. Thanks again for having me, Kristen. An intriguing question that the study and debate of animal tool use has raised is the role it should play in conservation efforts.

[00:15:38]The study on the alocelping behavior of the critically endangered southern resident killer whales states that maintaining this cultural continuity is a key goal under Canada's species at risk act. I know some fans of my channel might be thinking, "Wait, didn't you just caution against anthropomorphism in your last video?" And I say, for lack of a better word, because I'm trying to avoid anthropomorphism, which doesn't mean that I don't think they have culture. It just means that it's not like ours, so we can't know what it's like. The problematic aspect of the word culture is that it has historically been used to define humanity's place as separate and superior to nature and has reinforced a division between humans and animals, viewing the world as a human- centered construct. Because the word culture is an anthropocentric term. It gives the false impression that dolphin or sea otter culture is analogous to human cultures and that it shapes their behaviors, interactions, and evolution in the same way that cultures have influenced human development.

[00:16:35]Personally, I find it a bit egocentric to think that the human concept of culture is universal when it's far more likely that it is extremely diverse in ways that we do not fully understand at the moment.

[00:16:47]I think they do have culture. It's just different than ours.