Sea lions can dance to a beat .

Everybody dances. Whether performing on a stage, moving on the dance floor, or simply nodding their heads, everyone can keep the beat.

 There are only two mammals on the earth with the proven ability to move their bodies in the time with the external beat: Humans and Sea Lions.

When researchers at the University of Santa Cruz rescued a standard sea lion in 2013, they found that she was very smart, and she was even able to learn how to dance.

Though parrots can also keep rhythm, it was previously thought that only animals are capable of complex vocal learning could do this.
The sea lion was trained to listen to music, extract the beat, and nod her head in time.The wonderful part is that she was clearly listening to and matching each beat. 

Rewarded with fish, she bobbed along to each different tempo. To make sure she was dancing to an internalized, learned rhythm and not just blindly following the sound, they used a metronome that would miss beats – and they found that she kept grooving, even without a reliable conductor.

But from Snowball to she, the critters studied thus far seem to need to be trained to follow a rhythm, the authors noted – it doesn’t seem to arise spontaneously.

“The animals shown capable of entertainment have either received explicit training as in our study … or have long histories of human interaction that could have allowed for incidental social reinforcement of rhythmic behavior,” they write.

Then again, it’s possible that humans also learn to pick up beats through social reinforcement, the authors point out, so perhaps spontaneity isn’t as important as thought.

And even though sea lions don’t talk now, they added, “it is of course possible that future studies may reveal that sea lions do possess the capacity for some degree of complex vocal learning.”