Queen of the Beat 

It’s been more than a decade since Ronan the sea lion made waves with her uncanny ability to bob along to a beat.  

In 2013, the marine creature became a sensation with her ability to groove to the sounds of “Boogie Wonderland.” 

While some skeptics believed that her performance was a fluke, a new study shows that Ronan doesn’t just have rhythm but that she has gotten even better at grooving to a beat, even outperforming humans. 

To discover this, scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who say that years of training has made the now-16-year-old sea lion an expert at keeping to the tempo, conducted experiments: They tested the sea lion’s musical abilities against 10 UC Santa Cruz students, who were asked to wave their arms in sync with percussive beats at 112, 120, and 128 beats per minute (bpm). 

Ronan had only trained with 120 bpm before and the other tempos were new. 

But that didn’t stop her from trouncing the competition: The team noticed that, at her best tempo, she consistently hit within 15 milliseconds of the beat – a human blink takes about 10 times longer. 

“She is incredibly precise, with variability of only about a tenth of an eyeblink from cycle to cycle,” lead author Peter Cook explained in a statement. “She’s basically hitting the rhythmic bullseye over and over and over again.” 

Still, that performance puts the sea lion in the 99th percentile of modeled human beat-keeping, raising important questions about the cognitive mechanisms behind rhythm perception.  

For years, researchers believed that beat synchronization required vocal learning – the ability to mimic sounds – which sea lions don’t have.  

But Ronan’s skills show that this ability may not be limited to vocal learners, suggesting rhythm perception may be more widespread in the animal kingdom than previously thought. 

Her success also highlights how training, experience, and cognitive flexibility play a critical role in rhythm perception. The sea lion trained in roughly 2,000 short sessions over the years, showing how rhythm skills can be built up gradually – much like they are in humans. 

Even so, the authors emphasized that Ronan’s training was not intense, adding that her rhythm exposure is far less than that of a typical human child. 

“No human was better than Ronan at all the different ways we test quality of beat-keeping,” Cook told the Associated Press, adding that “she’s much better than when she was a kid.”