New research from the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California Santa Cruz suggests the ability to keep time is not unique to our species.
Ronan is the most consistent and precise mammalian beat keeper in experimental care. Image credit: Joel Sartore.
While some mammals and birds have proved able to move in time to rhythmic cues in laboratory experiments, most vertebrates show little evidence of beat synchronization.
However, Ronan — a Californian sea lion (Zalophus californianus) — was trained to recognize and bob her head in time to the pulse of a metronome at three years old and retained this ability into maturity.
“Despite decades of research with a wide range of species, there is no broad scientific consensus on whether or not human beat keeping — that is perceiving and moving to an isochronous pulse in complex stimuli such as music — is underpinned by unique biological mechanisms,” said lead author Dr. Peter Cook and his colleagues.
“The most thorough comparative datasets on sensorimotor synchronization actually come from invertebrate animals, with some insects such as fireflies and crickets demonstrating rate-sensitive synchrony with species-appropriate signals.”
“The precision and tempo range of these insects rival the performance of humans synchronizing to rhythmic cues.”
“However, unlike humans, who are florid synchronizers with a general ability to hear and move in time to a steady beat in a wide range of stimuli including music, invertebrate synchronizers show functional fixity, only entraining to a narrow range of specific cues.”
“Most lab evidence of beat keeping in non-human vertebrates comes from psittacines (subfamily of parrots), which tend not to show the same degree of consistency and precision as do humans, and from other primates, which seem to have great difficulty with lagless beat keeping,” they added.
“The notable exception is Ronan the sea lion, who was operantly conditioned to entrain a continuous head bob movement with metronomic sounds, and then demonstrated transfer of this behavior to novel acoustic tempos and wholly novel stimuli, including music.”
In their new study, Dr. Cook and co-authors assessed Ronan’s consistency and coordination in moving in time to the beat of a snare drum at 112, 120, and 128 beats per minute (bpm).
The same sounds were then presented to ten undergraduate students aged between 18 and 23 years old who were asked to chop their hand in time to the percussive beat.
The researchers monitored the precision of the participants’ timekeeping through video tracking software, and found that overall Ronan’s timekeeping was more accurate and less variable than the human subjects.
Ronan’s accuracy compared to humans increased with the tempo: at the tempo of 128 bpm, her performed average tempo was 129 bpm (± 2.94), while the average tempo of human subjects was 116.2 bpm (±7.34).
After the test, Ronan was rewarded with a toy filled with fish and ice.
As the study only assessed the time-keeping of one trained sea lion and ten humans, the reproducibility of these findings should be assessed through larger studies.
“This sea lion’s sensorimotor synchronization was precise, consistent, and indistinguishable from or superior to that of typical adults,” the scientists said.
“The findings challenge claims of unique neurobiological adaptations for beat keeping in humans.”
The results were published May 1, 2025 in the journal Scientific Reports.
_____
P.F. Cook et al. 2025. Sensorimotor synchronization to rhythm in an experienced sea lion rivals that of humans. Sci Rep 15, 12125; doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-95279-1
