Sea Lion ‘Ronan’ keeps up with Beats Challenging Previous Belief About Rhythmic Ability [VIDEO]

Humans are not the only species with some groovy dance moves , researchers have found evidence that some other mammals can also keep a beat.

It seems sea lions can keep a beat and recognize rhythm. This unique talent was seen in a rescued female sea lion 'Ronan', who has become a huge internet sensation after a video of her bobbing her head to music and sounds in a variety of tempos went viral.

Ronan, a California sea lion at Long Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz, sheds some light on animal cognition.  Peter Cook, who began working with Ronan as a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz, is impressed with her range and versatility in matching various beats.

"Along with other recent findings, this suggests that the neural mechanisms underpinning flexible beat keeping may be much more widely distributed across the animal kingdom than previously thought," Cook said.

Apart from humans, such rhythmic activity is also seen in parrots and other birds that have the ability for vocal mimicry. This discovery in birds led researchers to theorize that beat keeping demands a complex vocal learning.

"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," Cook said in a statement.

But vocal memory is absent in sea lions and they even have a limited sound ability. This unique ability in Ronan challenges the theory that vocal mimicry is a prerequisite for rhythmic activity.

Ronan was rescued in 2009 by Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito after she was spotted on Highway 1 in San Luis Obispo County. It was her third stranding and she struggled to survive in the wild, she was almost one year old when she was found. In 2010 she was transferred to the Long Marine Lab where she became a part of the Pinniped Cognition and Sensory Systems Laboratory.

It was Ronan's ability to grasp things quickly that made her a desirable subject and motivated the researchers to study her beat keeping ability.

"Everybody in the animal cognition world, including me, was intrigued by the dancing bird studies, but I remember thinking that no one had attempted a strong effort to show beat keeping in an animal other than a parrot. I figured training a mammal to move in time to music would be hard, but Ronan seemed like an ideal subject," Cook said.

Ronan was then trained to bob her head in time with rhythmic sounds. She was trained by Cook and a research technician Andre Rouse. She could bob her head to a variety of music and tempos she had never heard before. The duo soon realized that keeping the beat was not a challenging task for Ronan as she successfully kept up with new tracks and songs after the first training. The researchers suggest that musical ability may be widely distributed among other animals than what was previously thought.

The finding will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago, Feb 15, in a session devoted to "Rhythmic entrainment in non-human animals."