Ronan The Remarkable Beat-Keeping Sea Lion Has Better Rhythm Than Some Humans

That’s a pretty big deal in the context that Ronan became the only non-human mammal known to demonstrate precise beat-keeping back in 2013, something a team of scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, (UCSC) were able to put to the test in getting her to nod along to music. She proved she could keep in time, and even adjust her head-bopping to match music she hadn’t heard before.

Don’t upset the rhythm

From the Backstreet Boys to Earth, Wind & Fire, Ronan had that beat locked down, but some questioned if her talents were really matching that of a human’s. So, a new study put Ronan head-to-head with Homo sapiens to find out, and the results were seriously impressive.

It takes a human, on average, 150 milliseconds to blink. I’m telling you this because Ronan proved herself capable of hitting the beat within an average range of 15 milliseconds, meaning she only varied by a tenth of an eyeblink from the beat.

Compared to the human students used in the study, she was more precise and more consistent at every tempo tested. When all the human and non-human study participants’ performances were compiled together and modeled to scale up for 10,000 humans doing the same study, they found that Ronan scored in the 99th percentile. Ladies and gentlemen, put your flippers together for Ronan the rhythmic sea lion.

Patterns in nature

While entertaining to us humans, the capacity to dance along to a banger is likely of little use to a wild sea lion. However, if we consider what rhythm involves, it starts to make more sense from an evolutionary perspective.

Nature is full of patterns, and animals who can understand them can often predict what’s going to happen next – an obviously extremely useful skill.

Dr Peter Cook

“Break it down and it’s: 1) Perceiving a regular pattern in time; 2) Making predictions about the next events in a sequence based on that pattern; and 3) Planning and executing a movement to match the occurrence of that event, based on the predicted timing, based on the pattern understanding,” said corresponding author Dr Peter Cook of New College Florida and UCSC’s Pinniped Lab to IFLScience. “If you think of it like that, there’s no end of circumstances where the ability might be helpful to wild animals.”

“For sea lions, just off the cuff, consider moving your flippers in time to waves while swimming, watching an undulating fish swim as you try to catch it and using its pattern of movement to predict where it’s going and when it will get there, or trying to interpose your own vocalizations between another sea lion’s incessant barking so you can be heard. Nature is full of patterns, and animals who can understand them can often predict what’s going to happen next – an obviously extremely useful skill.”

Where did Ronan the rhythmic sea lion come from?

Sea lions typically nurse for around nine months, so if they find themselves on their own before that age, they may not yet know how to hunt. This can result in some rather creative problem-solving, from begging on the beach to – as Cook says sometimes happens in San Francisco – wandering into town and entering restaurants.

Ronan was born in the wild, but it seems something must’ve happened to her mother as she was showing up on beaches and interacting with humans from a young age. Rehabilitation workers got her fat and healthy, but still she kept coming back.

“I was in graduate school at UC Santa Cruz, and was studying the neurobehavioral effects of a common algal toxin in sea lions in rehabilitation,” said Cook. “Ronan ended up being a ‘control’ animal in my study ([as she had] no signs of neurotoxic exposure). I kept her for two weeks of her rehab and ran her through a bunch of mazes. She then went back to rehab and was released, but she couldn’t thrive on her own and kept coming into contact with humans, so it was determined that she should go into managed care.”

It was at that time that The Pinniped Lab at UCSC’s Long Marine Lab (run by Colleen Reichmuth, who is senior author on the new study) were on the lookout for a new sea lion subject. “Because she was so young, adaptive, curious, and motivated, she was the perfect animal to try out beat-keeping with – something that, at that time, no non-human animal had been shown able to do,” said Cook.

The results, I think, speak for themselves. If you’ve ever dreamed of watching a sea lion bop to Boogie Wonderland, your dreams are about to come true ~30 seconds into the below video:

Sea lions as study participants

Ronan is now middle-aged by sea lion standards and after 12 years in research, she’s a dab hand at the scientific process. She’s participated in around 2,000 rhythm exercises (that, notably, only last a few seconds each with years-long gaps between them), but when it’s time to Science, she ain’t messing around.

“It’s anthropomorphic, but she’s a bit of a nerd,” said Cook. “She is very focused when trying new cognitive and perceptual and training tasks. Like all female sea lions I’ve worked with, she really likes to get the right answer. She is not satisfied on a task if she’s only getting it some of the time. She wants to figure out how things work, and maximally exploit the system.”

She would give me the sea lion side eye.

Dr Peter Cook

And like all seasoned professionals, she doesn’t tolerate delays.

“Whenever she got a wrong answer or was waiting to start bobbing while we ironed out some technical difficulty, she would give me the sea lion side eye,” Cook added. “They have enormous, globular eyes, and when they’re a little bit frustrated, they tend to make a very distinctive huff out through their nostrils and cock one big eye at whatever is bothering them. Whenever I heard the huff and saw the eye rotate over to [me], I knew we had to get things moving!”

I guess don’t teach an animal precise beat-keeping if you don’t want them to remind you that time’s a-ticking.

The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.