It’s been a tough few months and the world is going to pot. Here’s a dancing sea lion.
Hey there, you.
Between natural disasters and the RFK of it all, the 2025 news cycle has been rough.
You deserve a break. Nay, you deserve more than a break – you deserve the joy of a headbanging sea lion.
Whether non-human animals can keep a musical beat or not has been the subject of research over several decades; thus far, the most thorough data comes from invertebrates like fireflies and crickets.
Both insects can demonstrate rate-sensitive synchrony rivalling that of a human, but only in response to a narrow range of cues.
Fireflies and crickets are a long way from making a good dance partner, then.
While some birds and mammals have demonstrated the ability to move in time to rhythmic cues, they normally aren’t spontaneous about it and don’t respond to biologically non-relevant stimuli like music; the groove is not in their hearts.
Enter Ronan, a 15-year-old wild-born sea lion who has been living at the University of California Santa Cruz pinniped lab since 2010.
She has been trained to bob her head in time with a metronome since she was three, and a new study in Nature Scientific Reports has revealed that her head-bobbing is more accurate and less variable than that of human subjects.
When 10 human subjects aged between 18 and 23 were asked to move their hand in time with a snare drum beating at a tempo of 128bpm, for instance, they averaged 116.2bpm.
When it came to Ronan’s turn, she bobbed her head at 129bpm.
Her mean tempo interview was closer to the stimulus rate than three of the humans at 112bpm, better than four of the humans at 120bpm and better than five at 128bpm.
No single human outperformed the sea lion on any of the experimental measures.
“The evolutionary mystery of human rhythmic behaviour persists,” the authors wrote.
“The present study indicates that contrary to recent theoretical claims, laboratory models with carefully trained non-human vertebrate animals can continue to play a role in elucidating the mechanisms of beat keeping behaviour.”
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