At the Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz, California, a 16-year-old sea lion named Ronan loves to put on a show. With her head bobbing in time to a percussive beat, she hits her marks not just with accuracy — but with flair. Her timing is so precise, researchers say, it outpaces even the best of us.
“She is incredibly precise, with variability of only about a tenth of an eyeblink from cycle to cycle,” said Peter Cook, a cognitive neuroscientist at New College of Florida and lead author of a new study out today in Scientific Reports. “Sometimes, she might hit the beat five milliseconds early, sometimes she might hit it 10 milliseconds late. But she’s basically hitting the rhythmic bullseye over and over and over again.”
And unlike her human competitors — 10 college students from UC Santa Cruz — Ronan wasn’t just better at her favorite beat. She kept pace at tempos she had never heard before, outperforming the humans at every speed.
A Sea Lion Star
Ronan’s story began on the shoulder of a California highway. In 2009, after multiple strandings caused by malnutrition, she was found wandering along Highway 1. Deemed unreleasable by wildlife agencies, she was adopted by the Pinniped Lab at UC Santa Cruz.
By 2013, she was already a sensation. That year, researchers showed she could keep time to pop songs like Earth, Wind & Fire’s Boogie Wonderland. At the time, scientists were shocked. Ronan was the first nonhuman mammal to demonstrate “rhythmic entrainment” — the ability to move in sync with a beat. Until then, that honor seemed reserved for humans, parrots, and maybe a few dancing primates.
But a decade later, questions lingered. Was her earlier performance a fluke? Could she still groove?
To find out, Cook and his colleagues gave her a more rigorous test. They asked Ronan, now 16 years old, to bob her head in sync with a metronome at three tempos: 112, 120, and 128 beats per minute. Only one was familiar. Meanwhile, the students moved their forearms in time to the same beats — a fair match, since “the hand is like the sea lion’s head, and the arm is like the sea lion’s neck,” Cook said.
What Did They Find?
These sessions were recorded with high-speed video to capture every precise motion. The goal for both sea lion and humans was the same: align the lowest point of their movement with the beat — and the results surprised even the researchers.
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“There was no human that was better than Ronan on every measure of precision and consistency,” Cook told The New York Times. “And she was better than most humans on all measures, so she really rose to the top.”
At certain tempos, her timing was more precise than that of 80% of the humans tested. Her movements were also less variable. She also kept pace with new ones — 112 and 128 beats per minute — that she had never encountered before.
At every tempo tested, Ronan produced exactly one adorable head bob per beat. No extras. No missed beats.
Rethinking Rhythm
Humans are often described as “natural synchronizers”, able to instinctively move to music. For years, scientists believed that rhythm is a human hallmark — or at the very least a trait reserved for animals that could mimic sounds. This idea, known as the “vocal learning hypothesis,” held that only species that could imitate vocalizations — like parrots and humans — could move to a beat.
Snowball, a cockatoo known for dancing to the Backstreet Boys, is a prime example. But Ronan doesn’t sing. She’s not a vocal mimic. And yet she can definitely feeling the rhythm.
“This study demonstrates conclusively that humans are not the only mammals able to keep a beat,” Tecumseh Fitch, a cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna, who was not involved in the research, said during in an interview with the NY Times.
Others remain skeptical. Aniruddh D. Patel, a cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts University, points out that Ronan needed training to develop her beat-keeping, unlike humans and parrots, who move to music spontaneously. “A very important difference,” he said.
Still, her ability challenges the idea that rhythm must be linked to language.
“It’s almost like precognition — knowing what’s going to happen before it does,” Cook explained for The Times. “Imagine, as a sea lion, swimming through choppy water and the energetic advantage of matching one’s flipper strokes to wave patterns. Or watching the rhythmic swimming motions of a fish as it tries to evade capture.”
In other words, rhythm may not be about music at all — but survival in the harsh wild.
What’s Next for Ronan?
Ronan’s participation is entirely voluntary. If she’s not in the mood to perform, she slides off her platform into the water. Over the years, she’s participated in fewer than 2,000 rhythm trials — many just seconds long, some years apart.
“She definitely wasn’t over-trained,” Cook told Newsweek. “If you added up the amount of rhythmic exposure Ronan has had since she’s been with us, it is probably dwarfed by what a typical 1-year-old kid has heard.”
Now in her prime at 170 pounds and 16 years old, Ronan is still learning. And Cook wants to push the boundaries even further.
“Can she do things that accelerate or decelerate? Can she do patterns that aren’t even steady in time but change?” he asked. “These are things humans can be quite good at. Can a nonhuman do those?”
He and his team also plan to train other sea lions — to see if Ronan is unique, or merely the first to get her big break.
“If you’re going to say dogs can’t dance, you have to empirically assess that,” Cook said. “I would be very surprised if you couldn’t get a border collie to do something like what Ronan does if you spend enough time on it.”