Despite an extensive collection of videos online claiming to show animals dancing, the ability to perceive and synchronize with a musical beat has largely been considered a uniquely human trait. That is, until now: two groups of researchers recently showed that parrots can boogie down with the best of us.

Aniruddh Patel (The Neurosciences Institute, San Diego, CA) worked with colleagues at University of California (San Diego) and the owners of a sulphur-crested cockatoo named Snowball to document Snowball's dancing ability, after Patel saw an online video of Snowball getting down to the Backstreet Boys' song “Everybody”. When Patel manipulated the tempo of the tune and played the faster versions to Snowball, the bird adjusted the tempo of his movements to remain synchronized with the beat (Curr. Biol. published online 30 April 2009; doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038).

In a companion study, Adena Schachner (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA) and colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge) and Brandeis University (Waltham, MA) confirmed that Snowball and an African grey parrot named Alex (who was well-known as a research subject prior to his unexpected death in 2007) both spontaneously moved in sync with music (Curr. Biol. published online 30 April 2009; doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.061). Schachner's group also analyzed a large selection of videos of purportedly dancing animals posted online and found that 14 different species of parrot were able to coordinate their movements with a beat.

The findings of both groups lend support to the hypothesis previously put forth by Patel that the ability to synchronize movement with music is linked to the capacity for vocal mimicry (learning and imitating sounds). Vocal mimicry is limited to humans, certain birds, cetaceans, pinnipeds, elephants and some bats but has not been demonstrated in other animals closely associated with humans, such as nonhuman primates or common domesticated species like cats and dogs. All of the animals that moved to the beat according to Schachner's study are vocal mimics, in keeping with Patel's hypothesis that only such animals should show rhythmic coordination. Furthermore, avian species are not known to coordinate their movements with auditory rhythms in their natural environments, meaning that the behavior must not be under direct natural selection and instead must have developed as a byproduct of some other ability.

Patel's and Schachner's results suggest that animal movement models may provide insights into the neurobiology and evolution of human response to music.