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Sea Lion Bops to the Beat, Challenging Popular Rhythm Theory

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Remember Snowball, the cockatoo who won the internet with his dancing skills? Well, now there’s a new animal keeping the beat alive. Meet Ronan, the California sea lion who bops her head in time to Boogie Wonderland and other tunes (see video below). Few species apart from humans have demonstrated a sense of rhythm, and the most convincing cases were all parrots and their relatives—animals with a talent for vocal mimicry. Scientists thus theorized that beat-keeping is linked to a capacity for complex vocal learning. But Ronan challenges this idea because sea lions are not vocal mimics. Peter Cook, a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his colleagues trained Ronan to bob her head to the beat of simple rhythm tracks, and once she mastered the skill, she was able to keep time with new songs with different tempos. "Human musical ability may in fact have foundations that are shared with animals," Cook said. "People have assumed that animals lack these abilities. In some cases, people just hadn't looked." A report detailing Ronan’s ability is being published this week in the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

Kate Wong is an award-winning science writer and senior editor at Scientific American focused on evolution, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, paleontology and animal behavior. She is fascinated by human origins, which she has covered for more than 25 years. Recently she has become obsessed with birds. Her reporting has taken her to caves in France and Croatia that Neandertals once called home, to the shores of Kenya's Lake Turkana in search of the oldest stone tools in the world, to Madagascar on an expedition to unearth ancient mammals and dinosaurs, to the icy waters of Antarctica, where humpback whales feast on krill, and on a "Big Day" race around the state of Connecticut to find as many bird species as possible in 24 hours. Kate is co-author, with Donald Johanson, of Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins. She holds a bachelor of science degree in biological anthropology and zoology from the University of Michigan. Follow Wong on X (formerly Twitter) @katewong

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