Comments on: Alex the parrot and Snowball the cockatoo show that birds can dance

By: Is Music for Wooing, Mothering….or Auditory Cheesecake? (via Discover Magazine) | Gradissima

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 18:17:23 +0000

[...] master rhythm. Since 2008 Patel and his colleagues have been studying a cockatoo named Snowball. He can dance to any music with a strong beat, although he seems particularly fond of Cyndi Lauper and the Backstreet Boys. Patel doesn’t think [...]

By: Martha

Martha — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 03:26:43 +0000

Thanks for this interesting piece. I would like to recommend a YouTube video of Frostie, a cockatoo who (I regret to say) dances even better than Snowball. I admire Snowball, but Frostie's creativity when dancing to Ray Charles ("Shake Your Tail Feather") is beyond the pale: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bt9xBuGWgw

By: Science Editor

Science Editor — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 07:22:05 +0000

Have none of you ever heard of special effects? Maybe the parrot is “dancing”–at least it isn’t shifting its weight in a way the defies the laws of physics. The cockatoo is not doing anything resembling dancing. Look at the bird’s balance when it lifts one leg–the bird should be off center, but it’s not. Its body is perfectly balanced, even when its leg is raised far off the ground.
Whatever happened to skeptical scientists?
What really interests me is what “base” they used to create this video. It isn’t a cockatoo, but what is it?

By: keir

keir — Mon, 18 May 2009 09:40:36 +0000

What about whales? They have complex vocalizations. Can they dance? Just wondering.

By: Jon

Jon — Sat, 02 May 2009 14:26:53 +0000

Very cool!
It would be fascinating to take some top-notch animal intellects (like chimps and crows) and see if they can groove to the beat under laboratory conditions (rather than youtube).
I don’t know if crows have vocal mimickry (I would guess that they do), but if they did maybe some other highly intelligent, though non-mimic, bird would work (as well as one that is not particularly intelligent, but still a mimic, assuming one could be found!)

By: Igor Zolnerkevic

Igor Zolnerkevic — Fri, 01 May 2009 01:13:12 +0000

When I glimpsed this research on Eurekalert! last week I just laughed at the videos and couldn´t see the point on doing such kind of study. Now I see why it matters.
Very interesting and intringuing too. For instance, I can imitate the sounds of many musical instruments with my mouth, but am terrible at following musical rhythm with body movements. I never would suspect that both abilities could be interrelated.

By: Valerie Brown

Valerie Brown — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:11:09 +0000

As a musician and science writer, I find this research highly amusing and fascinating. Snowball is clearly better at the grooving than Alex (alas!) was. However, if you took a random sample of humans and gave them the same test, you’d probably find some of them couldn’t find a beat if it hit them over the head, while others could get it right away. It seems very odd that primates in general are not so talented as birds. Maybe the gift resides outside the cerebral cortex.

By: Arborist

Arborist — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:39:26 +0000

I’m going to go search youtube for dancing elephants right now. Crazy!
I’m also not quite sure what type of vocal mimic an “animal” is. I guess that’s what we get for early results and figures without legends. Let us know when the paper comes out; I can’t wait to read the details.

By: Lilian Nattel

Lilian Nattel — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:47:54 +0000

Interesting & great videos! I wonder if this mimicking ability in humans is related to the development of oral language.

By: Andrew Forbes

Andrew Forbes — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:17:18 +0000

Another great story, Ed. It’s interesting that among the primates, “dancing to a beat” appears to be peculiar to humans.