Animals with Rhythm

What would you think of having a seal as a conductor?  I, personally really love studying animal behavior and their capabilities, so I thought, why not see if animals have rhythm? Take this California Sea lion for example:
Our local University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) actually did a study on this (shown above) on animals being able to keep rhythm! He described how they trained Ronan the sea lion to move her head in time to rhythmic sounds. When they first trained Ronan, they used a simple repetitive metronome sound, and rewarded her for her head-bobbing motion in time. After learning this, without further training, she was able to keep a constant rhythm and find the beat in different tempo songs. (Isn't it amazing?!) The only other animal that has been seen to keep a rhythm like this are parrots and other such animals. This created the belief that only animals with vocal mimicry could keep tempo. But because Ronan cannot do that, she disproves that fact. Sea lions are now the only known mammal other than humans to keep a beat (thanks to UCSC! (: ). An interesting topic to do further research upon, is what part of their brain allows them, parrots, and humans to do this?

A while ago, while browsing in the depths of YouTube, I came across a video of a cockatoo bird dancing to the song "Gangnam Style." At the time I thought nothing of it, other than, 'look, that bird is dancing to the song!' What never struck me was how it was bobbing its whole body and swishing its head from side to side in time. When cockatoos are very happy, excited, or angry, they fan out the feathers on their head (the difference between excited and angry is very clear, so don't think the song is making the bird angry). You can see the little bird clearly gets so excited when he hears the song that he can't contain himself, and has to start opening his wings, and fanning his feathers in excitement. I just found it very fascinating and amazing how music can make not only people feel good, but animals too! It's interesting too because most videos of birds dancing to music are specifically with the cockatoo bird. Maybe they are more responsive to it? I probably shouldn't be surprised, these birds are highly intelligent, and live to be 60+ years on average, with proper care. Here's some videos of cockatoos dancing to music, because who doesn't love it? :D


The one on the right really loves elvis, and the one on the left is embarrassed.

So, this just proves how rhythm in the animal kingdom is much greater than we thought it was. I hope some more research goes into this, it's really fascinating, and a great topic for research.

Mohini Batish