Birds love to boogie! Cockatoos have 30 distinct dance moves - and even link them together in elaborate routines, study finds

Daily Mail​

9 hours ago

If you thought head banging and body rolls were limited to rock concerts or hip-hop clubs, you'd be mistaken.
Experts have discovered that cockatoos have at least 30 different dance moves in their repertoire – including these two signature steps.
The routines – of which 17 are newly identified – can even be performed without music.
And it shows that the birds' dancing skills are far more common, complex and varied than previously thought.
Researchers from Charles Sturt University in Australia and Bristol University in the UK analysed 45 videos posted on social media that showed captive cockatoos dancing.
Some of the newly-documented moves include the semi-circle high, the downward head/foot sync, the fluff and the jump turn.
The researchers found that some birds also performed their own individual dance moves, often by combining several of the movements in unique ways.
The most common move, performed by 50 per cent of birds, was the 'downward' which involved the head bobbing in a downward motion while keeping the eyes facing forward.
Next came the 'sidestep', carried out by 43.5 per cent of cockatoos. Other popular moves included the 'fluff' which involves puffing up their feathers, and the headbang.
Overall, movements involving just the head were more common while the least common movements were those involving just wings.
Next, the researchers investigated dancing behaviour in six cockatoos from three different species housed at Wagga Wagga Zoo in Australia.
They played the birds music, an audio podcast, or no audio, and found that all birds performed dance moves, regardless of whether music was being played or not.
The study, published in the journal Plos One, revealed that dancing behaviour is present in nearly half of all species of cockatoo.
The authors say that further research is needed to determine whether the birds enjoy dancing and whether encouraging this behaviour could improve welfare for captive cockatoos.
Professor Rafael Freire said: 'The similarities with human dancing make it hard to argue against well-developed cognitive and emotional processes in parrots, and playing music to parrots may improve their welfare.
'Further research would be beneficial to determine if music can trigger dance in captive birds and serve as a form of environmental enrichment.'
Researcher Natasha Lubke added: 'As well as supporting the presence of positive emotions in birds and advancing dance behaviour as an excellent model to study parrot emotions, the work suggests that playing music to parrots may provide a useful approach to enrich their lives in captivity, with positive effects on their welfare.'
Several years ago, a viral cockatoo named Snowball was enlisted to help scientists study dancing in animals after becoming a YouTube sensation.
The talented bird managed to wow researchers with 14 different moves as he bopped along to 80s classics.
The sulphur-crested cockatoo was filmed swinging from side to side, lunging and lifting his foot as he grooved to Another One Bites The Dust and Girls Just Want To Have Fun.
Snowball showed a more diverse range of motions when bopping along to Cyndi Lauper's 1983 classic, however.
Scientists led by a team from the University of California, San Diego believe his 'remarkably diverse spontaneous movements' show that dancing is not limited to humans but a response to music when certain conditions are present in the brain.
British scientists have taught a group of seals how to copy human sounds and one of them how to sing the popular lullaby Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.
Researchers from the University of St Andrews worked with three young grey seals from birth to determine their natural repertoire and say the research could help others study speech disorders.
The seals were then trained to copy new sounds, such as vowels and melodies, by changing their formants, the parts of human speech sounds that encode most of the information that we convey to each other.
One seal, named Zola, was 'particularly good' at the musical side of things - correctly copying up to 10 notes of songs, including the classic jingle of 'Twinkle, Twinkle'.
The study, published in the journal Current Biology, found that the seals used their vocal tract in the same way as us - unlike our closest relatives in the animal world, monkeys and apes.
Now scientists working on disorders can use seals as a new model system to study the 'nature vs. nurture' element of our speech development.
Researchers Dr Amanda Stansbury and Professor Vincent Janik, of the Scottish Oceans Institute (SOI) at St Andrews worked together on the project.
They taught the seals to sing by playing sounds close to their natural vocal range, before rewarding them with treats when they successfully copied them.
Dr Stansbury, who now works at El Paso Zoo in Texas, said: 'I was amazed how well the seals copied the model sounds we played to them.
'Copies were not perfect but given that these are not typical seal sounds it is pretty impressive.
'Our study really demonstrates how flexible seal vocalisations are. Previous studies just provided anecdotal evidence for this.'
Professor Janik, Director of the SOI, said: 'This study gives us a better understanding of the evolution of vocal learning, a skill that is crucial for human language development.'
He added: 'Surprisingly, non-human primates have very limited abilities in this domain.
'Finding other mammals that use their vocal tract in the same way as us to modify sounds informs us on how vocal skills are influenced by genetics and learning and can ultimately help to develop new methods to study speech disorders.'
As seals separate from their mothers when they are just two or three weeks old, the findings suggest they could be used to study speech disorders and test different methods for slower learners, the researchers said.
'Since seals use the same neural and anatomical structures as humans to produce these sounds, they provide a good model system in which to study how speech sounds are learned,' Professor Janik said.
'As they separate so early from their mothers, we can control what exactly they hear when, which makes such studies much easier than with humans who are exchanging sounds with parents for all of their development all the time.'
A seal called Hoover was documented copying human speech - including phrases like 'how are you?' - at the New England aquarium in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1980s.
However, this does not necessarily mean that the mammals could learn to talk like humans.
Professor Janik added: 'While seals can copy such sentences, they would not know what they mean.
'We would have to investigate whether they are able to label objects vocally, which is a key requirement for actually talking about things.
'Our study suggests that they have the production skills to produce human language. Whether they can make sense of it would be the next question.'