Musical Sea Lion Adding to New View of Animals
May 7, 2025
Grooving to a playlist of songs, a teenage California sea lion named Ronan has demonstrated anew her ability to keep a beat, better than when she was a pup, and even better than college students. Her accumulating rhythmic skills seemingly add to what Brandon Keim describes in Issues as science’s expanding sense that animals are “fellow intelligent beings” with humans, possessing active minds, emotional capabilities, and social awareness. “To think of each animal as a someone rather than a something,” he writes, “is where the science is pointing us”—and could influence a host of policies for how humans share the world.