Birds Got Rhythm

05/05/2009

People aren’t the only animals that can ‘get down’ to James Brown. In two studies just published in Current Biology, scientists found that some animals could genuinely dance to a beat. Once thought to be the sole domain of human beings, turns out parrots and elephants have the ability to time their movements in response to a changing tempo.

Over 2 million people have viewed Snowball the dancing sulphur-crested cockatoo on Youtube as he rocks out, headbanging and moving his feet along with the tempo of Backstreet Boys and Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust (Snowball appeared on Animal Planet’s “2007 Year in Animals” show). Adena Schachner of Harvard University studied over 1,000 Youtube videos, including those of Snowball, dissecting them frame by frame to see whether the animals’ movements aligned with the musical beat.

They found that Snowball, other parrot species, and elephants could move synchronously to music. The scientists failed to find the same ability in dogs, cats, or chimpanzees – our closest living relatives. The biologists felt they didn’t have enough evidence that the elephant was not merely trained to move in that way, or that chimps and other apes can’t dance.

In a separate study, Aniruddh Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego and colleagues collaborated with the Snowball’s owners at the Bird Lovers Only Rescue Service in Indiana to conduct a live and in-person musical test of Snowball’s dancing prowess. They needed to confirm that the bird was not mimicking someone off-camera but genuinely moved to the beat, adjusting his tempo to the music. And he did! Sulphur-crested cockatoos hail from Australia and New Guinea but in their native haunts they don’t engage in sophisticated courtship behavior that involves dancing or melodious vocalizations.

Animals don’t naturally gyrate to beats in the wild, so most scientists assumed dancing and moving rhythmically was a human ability. These new studies challenge that. Patel suggests that the animals that they found could “dance” can do so because of similar brain wiring with humans, due to a shared ability to mimic sounds and engage in complex vocal learning. Other species that learn by mimicking and vocalization – but which the scientists did not study – include walruses, seals and dolphins.

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Comments

[JJ Murphy]

I don't know where people got the idea that we are the only creatures that have individual perceptions and responses.

After a few bird walking tours in New York City, I have no doubt that urban birds including cardinals, robins, sparrows and some warblers will line up waiting for seeds when people with binoculars making "pish" noises walk by.

[Tara]

I love this! That bird is clearly having a ball rocking out. He has better rhythm than I do...