08-05-2025
Ronan The Sea Lion Can Keep A Beat As Well As Humans Can
Sea lion Ronan first made the news in 2013, when researchers revealed that Ronan had the unusual ability to bob her head to the beat. Twelve years later, Ronan still loves a good beat. A new study about her unusual musical ability describes how she has no trouble keeping up with humans in a rhythm exercise.
The human volunteers in the study were ten undergraduate students at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They were all asked to move their arm up and down to a beat, much like how Ronan moves her head. At three different tempos, the sea lion almost perfectly stayed on the beat.
'She is incredibly precise, with variability of only about a tenth of an eyeblink from cycle to cycle,' Peter Cook, who led the study, told UC Santa Cruz. 'Sometimes, she might hit the beat five milliseconds early, sometimes she might hit it 10 milliseconds late. But she's basically hitting the rhythmic bullseye over and over and over again.'
Ronan's sense of rhythm is certainly not the result of excessive training. 'Realistically, if you added up the amount of rhythmic exposure Ronan has had since she's been with us, it is probably dwarfed by what a typical 1 year old kid has heard,' says Cook. Researchers left her in control of when to take part or not, so they only tested her when she felt like it and each rhythm exercise only lasted a few seconds. 'To her, it's a game she knows how to win, and she likes the fish that come with it,' says Colleen Reichmuth, who runs the Pinniped Lab at Long Marine Laboratory where Ronan has lived since 2010.
Ronan was not born in captivity, but as a young sea lion she kept stranding ashore because she wasn't eating enough. After she was found wandering along a highway in 2009, the sea lion was considered unsuitable for life in the wild. She's now 16 and seems to be thriving as the world's first known sea lion with a sense of rhythm, but some other animals are known for their musical skills as well.
In late 2007, Snowball the cockatoo went viral online for his expressive dance moves. The bird danced to the Backstreet Boys with head bops and paw kicks. Most impressively, he seemed to be perfectly on beat.
His moves caught the attention of researcher Aniruddh Patel, who has since studied Snowball's sense of rhythm. One of the theories from the bird research was that cockatoo's ability to mimic human sounds with their voice had something to do with their sense of rhythm. After all, at the time only cockatoos and humans could dance, and both species can vocalise.
But sea lions don't use their voice in the same way. They don't mimic human speech. So when Ronan first showed her moves in 2013, it made researchers have to rethink what could be behind our (and Ronan's, and Snowball's) sense of rhythm.
Music plays an enormous role in our lives. We make music, we listen to music, and it plays in the background in shops, films and elevators. Music is just always there, and seems inherently human. But there's something deeper at play. Music therapy and dance therapy are being used successfully to help people with neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
Researchers are still trying to understand how exactly our brains interpret and interact with music. Knowing that other animals can dance suggests that their brains, however different they are, might do something similar to ours. Studying animal behavior can teach us more about our own brains, too.
