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SANTA CRUZ — Music and rhythm are something that have been seen only in humans. Keeping a beat has been observed in some parrots and related species. But there's one more species on the dance floor now: sea lions.
Or at least one sea lion. Ronan, who is a research animal at the Long Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been trained to rock her head to the grooves of the Backstreet Boys and The Miracles' song "Love Machine."
What's important about the accomplishment — other getting super funky — it this is the first time that keeping a beat has been shown in a mammal species other than humans. That challenges some assumptions of the past, for instance that only vocal animals were capable of rhythmic motion.
"The idea was that beat keeping is a fortuitous side effect of adaptations for vocal mimicry, which requires matching incoming auditory signals with outgoing vocal behavior," said trainer and graduate student Peter Cook. "It's understandable why that theory was attractive. But the fact is our sea lion has gotten really good at keeping the beat. Our finding represents a cautionary note for an idea that was really starting to take hold in the field of comparative psychology."
Cook trained Ronan, who is described as a particularly bright member of her species, by first playing a repreating sound much like a metronome and rewarding her with fish. After a few months, she was adept at keeping time.
Cook and other researchers, working on weekends as a side project, then started to introduce novel rhythms and music. Ronan showed a surprising ability to adapt to new stimuli.
"Given her success at keeping the beat with new rhythm tracks and songs following her initial training, it's possible that keeping the beat isn't that hard for her," Cook said. "She just had to learn what it was we wanted her to do."
According to Cook, some parrots and other birds show the ability to keep time even without being explicitly trained, though he notes that these birds can learn much from their human owners through unintended examples. But he also said that Ronan was much better at it than most birds.
More research will be conducted into the core of where musical abilities come from in mammals. Cook and others will be authoring a paper on their findings for publication in the future.
