Watch: Ronan The Sea Lion Demonstrates Superior Rhythm Skills Over Humans

A recent study has revealed that a 16-year-old California sea lion named Ronan possesses an exceptional ability to keep a beat, outperforming chimpanzees, lemurs, and even some humans, according to BBC Science Focus. Ronan’s talent lies in her adaptability to synchronize her movements with new rhythms, demonstrating a unique understanding of musical timing. At her most practised tempo, she consistently hits within 15 milliseconds of the beat. For comparison, a literal blink of an eye is about 150 milliseconds. 

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“No other non-human animal is as precise and consistent as Ronan is,” Prof Peter Cook, lead author of the study and a comparative neuroscientist at New College of Florida, told BBC Science Focus. 

“However, Ronan didn’t use to be as precise and consistent as she is now.” 

Cook and his colleagues first trained Ronan in rhythm perception back in 2012, when she was just three years old. At the time, she was already the best non-human beat keeper on record. 

But some scientists questioned whether her performance really matched that of adult humans. She showed more variability from beat to beat, and unlike human listeners, she tended to drift slightly ahead of the beat at slower tempos and lag behind at faster ones. (Humans, by contrast, tend to consistently strike just ahead of the beat.) 

“Most human rhythm data is on adults, with decades of informal rhythmic experience — dancing, tapping feet to music, and so on,” Cook said. 

“We tested Ronan when she was basically a kid… Now that Ronan is a fully grown adult sea lion, and now that she has had more practice and experience, how does she measure up to humans?”

To find out, the team asked 10 University of California, Santa Cruz, undergraduate students to mimic Ronan’s head-bobbing motion using a large, fluid arm movement. They then compared this with Ronan’s own performance at three tempos, including two she hadn’t encountered before. 

She outperformed the students in consistency and accuracy, even landing in the 99th percentile of a model simulating 10,000 humans performing the same task.