They’re not known to be particularly great dancers, but harbor seals may have a decent sense of rhythm, according to a new research study. Scientists worked with seals at a seal rescue center in The Netherlands and discovered that the animals responded to rhythm in much the same way as a human baby would.
Harbor seals can not only learn new vocalizations, but they also have a sense of rhythm, and these … [+]
Despite what you might think of your own abilities, humans are generally pretty good at recognizing different rhythms. That’s not surprising, because we use it daily, even if just to talk. To distinguish patterns in language, we’re used to taking some cues from rhythm, and researchers think that this is why birds – who can be taught new vocal sounds – can distinguish rhythm as well.
Indeed, one of the most well-known animals that has demonstrated to feel the beat is a cockatoo called Snowball. Here’s a video of Snowball dancing – always a fun way to start the weekend.
It could also explain why animals that don’t tend to create new vocalizations have more trouble with rhythm. But with only birds and humans, there isn’t a lot of data to go on. That’s why researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics decided to look at harbor seals. They’re one of the few mammals who are also able to learn new vocalizations. They use that trick to make themselves sound “bigger”, to scare off potential predators.
If seals can learn to make new sounds, does that mean they also have a sense of rhythm, just like humans and birds? To test this, the researchers visited seal rescue and rehabilitation center Pieterburen on the North coast of The Netherlands. Here they were able to study wild seals and see how they responded to rhythm.
Despite their clever vocalizations, seals can’t talk, so to measure whether they understood rhythm, the researchers used the same approach they would use with human babies: They played sounds behind the seals’ backs and measured how often the curious animals would turn their head to look toward the source of the sound.
The seals turned their heads more at sounds with regular rhythms than at irregular sounds, and also showed that they could tell the difference between long and short sounds or slow and fast sounds. In other words, the seals had a basic sense of rhythm.
According to researcher Laura Verga, who led the study, this is interesting because it tells us that humans are not the only mammal that grasps the concept of rhythm. She told the Max Planck Institute, “This is a significant advance in the debate over the evolutionary origins of human speech and musicality, which are still rather mysterious.”
This doesn’t mean that seals and humans are the only mammals who can pick up a rhythm. There simply haven’t been enough tests in other species yet, but that’s something Verga and other researchers would like to look at in the future.
