The Thing with Feathers (16 page)

It wasn’t a perfect match. Snowball often drifted ahead of or behind the beat, and in some trials, especially at slow speeds, refused to dance at all. Patel isolated instances of synchronized dancing among longer periods that were not matched to the tempo of the music, called them synchronized bouts, and found that such periods accounted for only about 25 percent of the time Snowball spent dancing—meaning that three-quarters of the time the parrot was well off beat. If anything, Snowball preferred to bob along at faster speeds; when all movements were combined, the bird’s motions averaged quicker than the underlying tempo.

But Patel still thought that Snowball was moving rhythmically. The researcher took a closer look at the synchronized bouts he’d picked out, performing a statistical test to determine whether those periods could have occurred randomly. The result was highly significant: The probability of Snowball displaying even as much synchronization as he did merely by chance was minuscule.

That satisfied Patel. Along with a couple of coauthors, including Irena Schulz, he published a paper called “Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal” in the journal
Current Biology
. The paper itself was noteworthy. It marked the first time that any animal, besides us, had been shown to coordinate its
movements to an external musical rhythm—a characteristic that had been regarded as uniquely human.

—

LOTS OF ANIMALS DANCE,
in a broad sense. Under the general definition, “to move rhythmically,” just about any creature can be said to dance at some point in its life. Dancing doesn’t necessarily have to occur to a beat; even humans dance without music sometimes, and many animals make movements that might satisfy a more encompassing definition, for all kinds of unrelated reasons.

For instance, honeybees do a well-documented “waggle dance” to convey the location of food outside the hive; the angle of the dance refers to the direction and the distance to the food. Male rattlesnakes intertwine in a sinuous battle for the right to mate. The shovel-snouted lizard of Namibia dances across hot sand dunes to keep its feet from roasting. Cuttlefish habitually pulsate and turn colors to psyche out their prey. Short-tailed weasels perform a crazy “dance of death” that, as far as anyone can tell, may either serve to confuse prey or be caused by an infection in the brain. Spinner dolphins, when they leap wildly out of the water, are thought to be ridding themselves of parasites—or, just possibly, jumping for joy.

In wild birds, dancing is usually confined to seduction. Whooping cranes perform elaborate courtship displays complete with floating liftoffs, high kicks, and 360-degree ballerina turns. The bizarre New Guinea bird of paradise resembles nothing more than a shimmering flying saucer as he struts for the female, with specialized plumes dangling dark specks like a cloud of flies around his head. Clark’s grebes take their dancing to the water, where, after a period of mutual head bobbing, they plane in pairs like jetboats across the surface of a
lake, mimicking each other’s movements à la
synchronized swimmers.

Maybe the most accomplished avian dancers are the manakins, a group of related tropical bird species that are each smaller than a Rubik’s Cube but display all the same bright colors. For manakins, being colorful isn’t enough; females expect their mates to dance—and not one by one, but all at once. Male manakins gather in the dense, dark understories of South and Central American rainforests in the greatest dance contests of the bird world. Each species has perfected its own moves. The red-capped manakin, for instance, slides sideways along a branch in a passable rendition of Michael Jackson’s moonwalk. The club-winged manakin claps its wings a hundred times a second—twice as fast as a hummingbird—to produce a mechanical trilling sound in short bursts. The most extreme species, such as the long-tailed manakin of Central America, use wingmen: Two males dance together in a tightly choreographed cartwheel in front of a prospective female, each vocalizing as they leapfrog over each other’s backs. By previous agreement, one of them always gets to mate afterward while the other sits in the bushes nearby. A pair of male long-tailed manakins may work together like this for five years, building up their jungle reputation as hot dancers, before the alpha male dies and the backup dancer takes his place with a new apprentice. It’s the only example of cooperative male-male displays ever discovered in the entire animal kingdom. Who says humans are the only species with boy bands?

But throw on a song like “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” and even manakins would probably be at a loss. As intricate as their moves are, the choreography is always the same, to an unvarying tempo. And they dance only to their own vocalizations. Strictly speaking, this isn’t dancing at all; most
dictionaries mention both movement and an external beat in their first definition of the verb
dance
. Manakins have the moves, but not the rhythm.

None of these examples of dancing animals satisfies that narrower definition. Although their movements are interesting, they don’t illuminate the evolution of dancing to a beat, which is a specific cognitive ability. That’s what makes Snowball so special: He can adapt his dancing to whatever song happens to be playing, be it a slow jam or a rousing polka. His rhythm is a little rough—Patel compared Snowball’s synchronization ability to that of a small child—but the parrot does get down when he hears music. Snowball is interesting because he has crossed a line that was once thought to separate people from all these other shimmying animals.

Which brings up the question: Is Snowball a weird one-off, or do other animals nurture as-yet-unrecognized dancing abilities? Perhaps South American manakins could collectively rock out to the worst of 1990s teen pop if someone would just load up the jungle with boom boxes. Because scientists have for so long assumed that animals can’t dance, maybe they haven’t looked hard enough for evidence. In a global search for nonhuman dancing talent, where would you start?

—

WHILE ANI PATEL
was busy analyzing Snowball, a Ph.D. student of psychology at Harvard, Adena Schachner, was inspired to look for dancing animals in the same place Snowball got his break—on YouTube. Schachner was particularly interested in various theories of how music and dance first developed in humans. Psychologists can’t seem to agree on even basic facts concerning the origins of music, and Schachner thought that animals might give some clues about our own evolution.

Casting a wide net, she decided to scientifically analyze as many YouTube videos as possible of dancing animals for indications of real rhythm. This meant trolling through page after page of search results for terms such as “dancing cat,” “dancing bird,” and “dancing monkey,” and independently scoring each video on a set of guidelines: presence of an animal, rhythmic sound, periodic movement, and other general criteria to narrow the field. Most videos were clearly not candidates for her study, and Schachner quickly descended into the bottomless online abyss of cute puppies, funny cats, and talking hamsters.

One of the top results for “dancing dog,” for instance, features a canine named Carrie, wearing a dress, performing a full merengue dance with her owner while balancing on hind legs. (Space does not permit full treatment of the video’s comments, generated from nearly 15 million views, but the highest-rated comment was “I have reached the end of the Internet. Guess I’ll turn around and just keep going.”)

Alternatively, a search for “dancing cat” yields any number of ridiculous animations of pets set to various sound tracks, such as “The Kitty Cat Dance,” a timeless clip described as “the heartwarming tale of a cat’s insatiable lust for provocative dancing.” Viewer responses range from “I watch this every day” to “brain.exe has stopped working.”

Schachner later lamented that the amusement of YouTube lasted for only a couple of hours, after which viewing the videos became something of an endurance test. Nonetheless, she amassed a collection of about 5,000 video clips, from which she selected a more-manageable 400 that each showed some animal moving in the presence of rhythmic sound. For any particular clip that suggested coordination with a beat, she used the same careful analytic techniques that Patel used with Snowball
to determine whether the animals were displaying true rhythm. Common subjects were ferrets, dogs, parrots, horses, cats, albatrosses, pigeons, elephants, squirrels, dolphins, and fish, with dozens of others, including chimpanzees and orangutans.

In the end, only thirty-three videos showed signs of synchronized dancing. Parrots—of fourteen different species—accounted for twenty-nine of them; the other four showed Asian elephants.

At the very least, the results indicated that Snowball was not unique. Frostie, an up-and-comer parrot from California, has lately surpassed Snowball’s YouTube view count with a lively interpretation of an aptly named song, “Shake Your Tailfeather.” In the video’s description, Frostie’s owner declares, “Frostie can dance the socks off any bird on this planet!”

But besides parrots and elephants, no other animals made the cut. Despite analyzing dozens of dancing dogs and cats, some of which (especially dogs) had been trained for years to perform with their owners in elaborate competitions, Schachner could find no evidence that any of them were spontaneously moving to a beat—not even Carrie, the merengue star. Furry pets relied on their owners for direction or cavorted randomly to a musical backdrop.

The lack of evidence for primates is especially compelling. What could possibly set parrots and elephants—and us—apart from our close relatives, monkeys and apes?

Schachner nursed a personal theory, put forward earlier by Patel and strengthened by the study of Snowball, that the secret of dance is tied to an ability to mimic vocal sounds. Language, music, and dance are known to be tightly interrelated; excellence in one discipline may translate to the others. Patel had argued that only animals that are vocal mimics, learning to communicate by copying one another, have the potential to
synchronize their movements with an external beat. In vocal-mimicking animals, cognition of sound is necessarily tied to motor skills. They hear something and move accordingly.

Relatively few animals are true vocal mimics, as far as we know: songbirds, parrots, hummingbirds, whales, dolphins, porpoises, walruses, seals, sea lions, elephants, some bats, and humans. The list includes a few creatures you might not expect, and covers both parrots and elephants—but, tellingly, no primates other than humans.

Brain structure seems to back up this theory. Birds that copy sounds have been shown to have modified basal ganglia, in parallel to the part of the human brain that helps identify musical beats. This could be the mechanical reason for an association of mimicry and rhythm: Parts of the brain that control auditory perception and motor skills have become physically more closely connected in animals that are vocal mimics.

The results of her YouTube study convinced Schachner that vocal mimicking helps predict the ability to perceive a musical beat. She also performed a separate case analysis of Snowball along with another famous parrot, a veteran African gray parrot named Alex that had been well studied by animal psychologists for decades (the bird’s very name was an acronym for “avian language experiment”); neither Snowball nor Alex had been explicitly trained to dance, but both showed clear signs of spontaneous synchronization to music they’d never heard before. Finally, Schachner tried the same methods with a group of nine cotton-top tamarins, a type of monkey native to Colombia that weighs less than a pound. The tamarins may have been amused by Schachner’s music, but they definitely didn’t dance to it.

If all vocal-mimicking animals were able to dance, though,
you’d expect hummingbirds and bats to join in, along with other species on the list. Why only parrots, elephants, and humans?

Both Patel and Schachner admit that it’s not a perfect theory, going only so far as to say that mimicry is a precondition of dancing to a beat. They agree that other preconditions probably exist, perhaps including a social nature (which would immediately rule out most hummingbirds, for starters, as discussed in the chapter titled “Hummingbird Wars”), a superior cognitive standard (which would make sense in the context of parrots, elephants, and humans), and the desire to mimic movements as well as sounds. Snowball’s owners have often danced with him, and he seems to copy their arm-flapping motions (though Irena Schulz insists that the parrot has invented his own moves and sometimes dances inside an empty room if music is left playing). Without a role model, Snowball may never have learned the behavior at all. The same could potentially be said for any pet parrot dancing on YouTube.

And even if the vocal mimicry hypothesis is true, it’s unclear whether the idea has much greater meaning in the animal kingdom. Parrots in the wild don’t dance, even though they are still excellent vocal mimics. Elephants in the wild don’t dance, either, though elephants do show advanced learning and memory. We now know that parrots have the ability, but we can only assume that dancing to a musical beat has no practical benefit for creatures outside of human civilization. Dancing, in terms of wild animal behavior, is thus reduced to an intriguing psychological footnote.

For people, though, that assumption is less applicable. Some researchers believe that dancing parrots may bear on one of the greatest debates of human musical history.

—

WHEN IT COMES
to the evolution of modern music, researchers are divided into two camps. Some say music is biologically useless—that it is a mere by-product of our large, complex brains. Others declare that music must have evolved through natural selection because it gave humans an adaptive benefit. The answer is shrouded in ancient history, but that doesn’t stop people from arguing about it.

Darwin himself had a difficult time with the question. “Neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life,” he wrote in
The Descent of Man
, published in 1871. Yet, he observed, music is present “in men of all races, even the most savage.”