Sea lion proves animals can keep a beat

What happened

A 15-year-old sea lion named Ronan proved better at keeping a beat than 10 college students in a rhythmic dance-off, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.

The results challenge the long-held theory that "only animals who were vocal learners — like humans and parrots — could learn to find a beat," Hugo Merchant, a researcher at Mexico's Institute of Neurobiology not involved in the study, told The Associated Press.

Who said what

Ronan first upended ideas about which animals can dance in 2013, when she was shown to move in time with music. Her "headbanging ability sparked a scientific debate over whether what she was doing could really be compared with human's rhythmic skills" or whether it was a fluke, The New York Times said.

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A team led by Peter Cook, a behavioral neuroscientist at New College of Florida, decided to test that out with the dance-off between the students and Ronan, a resident of U.C. Santa Cruz's Long Marine Laboratory. "No human was better than Ronan at all the different ways we test quality of beat-keeping," Cook said, and "she's much better than when she was a kid."

What next?

Cook and his colleagues plan to "train and test other sea lions" to see if they can "also bob to a beat," the AP said, and challenge Ronan with more unpredictable rhythms. "Can she do things that accelerate or decelerate?" Cook told the Times. "These are things humans can be quite good at. Can a nonhuman do those?"