Huge Hat Tip to Mitch, who inspired this post!

Mitch was kind enough to recently share a delightful video titled “Birds Can Dance!”

Despite my hearing deficit, I thought it was very cool!  Although it was the creative and complex editing that made them look like they were dancing, it was very entertaining.

But it caused me to start wondering: Can birds actually dance?  So I started searching, and it turns out the answer is a scientifically proven YES!

But first we need to recognize that this was the answer to the scientific definition of what “Dance” means, because it’s been long believed that only humans have the ability to dance.

“Dancing” is an untutored, spontaneous response where the animal moves on the beat, matching motion to music.  The animal cannot have a trainer.  There cannot be a human in the room whose moves it copies.  It cannot be rewarded for its movements.  It cannot spend weeks exposed to the same tune.  And when the music changes tempo, it has to change with it, sticking to the beat.  So the “dance” is triggered by sound, but the moves come from within the animal itself.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/04/01/297686709/the-list-of-animals-who-can-truly-really-dance-is-very-short-who-s-on-it

And we need to realize that none of the animals that science has decided can truly “dance” are going to give any of the contestants on “Dancing With the Stars” a run for their money.

But still, they have provided not only a lot of entertainment for the masses – but also served science well.  So how did a sulphur-crested cockatoo named Snowball get to be a main participant in a science research project?

It all began with a YouTube video of him boogieing to “Everybody (Back Street’s Back) by the Back Street Boys … I kid you not!

A colleague of Dr. Aniruddh Patel, then a neurobiologist at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, CA, (now a professor at Tufts) asked him to watch the video of Snowball grooving, and Dr. Patel reports his reaction:

“I still remember it.  I was staring at the screen and my jaw just hit the floor.  I thought, ‘Is this real?  Could this actually be happening?’  Within minutes I’d written Snowball’s owner.”

Snowball had been taken to a bird shelter in northern Indiana because the daughter, who was the primary caretaker, began college.  The dad and daughter also provided Irena Schulz, director of the shelter, with a CD by the Back Street Boys, and told her to play it if Snowball looked bored.

One day Irena cranked up the CD and was astounded at what happened next.  She immediately grabbed a video of Snowball’s strutting his moves on the back of a chair and submitted it to YouTube – where it almost immediately went viral!

A few months later she got a call from Dr. Patel who was astounded by the birds dancing.  “Let’s design an experiment to see if this is real.”  Ms. Schulz, who had previously worked as a molecular biologist, agreed: “Yeah, let’s do that!”

They made 11 different versions of “Everybody,” all at the same pitch, but changed the tempos from 2.5% to 20% faster and then slower than the original.

They played each version and videotaped Snowball’s response, and then analyzed each video frame by frame.

Snowball wasn’t perfect (and was actually pretty bad at the slower tempos).  But he was on the beat at least 60% of the time – very much like a toddler when learning to dance to music.  Statistical analysis of the data confirmed that Snowball was, in fact, dancing in time with the music.

To my mind, equally impressive is that Snowball had developed a repertoire of 14 distinct moves – none of which were taught to him.  He created them on his own.  To be tabulated as a distinct move it had to occur on two separate occasions.  Let’s enjoy them:

At the same time Dr. Patel was studying Snowball, another research group at Harvard was studying Alex, an African grey parrot, who also danced.  They also concluded that Alex’s movements were synchronized with the beat of the music, and did not occur merely by chance.  They wondered what feature(s) these animals shared with humans that enabled them to dance.

One of the researchers, Adena Schachner (then a graduate student at Harvard) said:  “It had recently been theorized that vocal mimicry (the ability to acquire sounds through learning) might be related to the ability to move to a beat.  The particular theory was that natural selection for vocal mimicry resulted in a brain mechanism that was also needed for moving to a beat. This theory made a really specific prediction: Only animals that can mimic sound should be able to keep a beat.”

Schachner realized that since people loved posting videos of their critters “performing,” she decided YouTube would be a wonderfully unique research resource.

She collected over 5,000 YouTube videos of wildly different animals (dogs, cats, chimps, orangutans, horses, etc.) and analyzed them frame-by-frame to see it they were moving to the beat.  She narrowed the “dancers” down to 39 animals.  Twentynine of them were in the parrot family, comprised of 14 different species.  The rest were Asian elephants.

The one feature that all animals who can dance share with humans is vocal mimicry or vocal learning.  Surprisingly enough our closest relatives (apes and monkeys) lack this ability.  While they can certainly learn from one another, they don’t mimic each other’s sounds.  And Schachner found no videos showing they could inherently move to a beat.

I doubt Dr. Patel ever thought that YouTube, besides being entertaining, would prove that a bird’s variety of movements would indicate a type of cerebral flexibility that suggests his creative choreography is not simply “a brainstem reflex to sound.  [But] actually a complex cognitive act that involves choosing among different types of possible movement options. It’s exactly how we think of human dancing.”

As always, the fun part of science is finding answers.  So now, thanks to Patel’s new paper, we learned we are not the only ones dancing to the beat: “Spontaneity and diversity of movement to music are not uniquely human.”

And Snowball, who is only 25 years old, could be providing answers for another half-century since Cockatoos in captivity can live to be about 75.

I can’t help but wonder what Freddie Mercury would think if he knew that a cockatoo dancing to his signature song got over 8 MILLION clicks.  So let’s let Snowball dance his way out to Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”.