How Smart Are Sea Lions? What Ronan and the Lab Studies Show

How smart are sea lions? Smart enough to pass tests that once seemed to need language or music. A California sea lion matched pairs of shapes it had never been taught to pair, and one remembered a concept after about 10 years. A sea lion named Ronan learned to bob her head in time to a beat. No sea lion has an IQ score.

New here: the three best-known experiments test three different things, and none compares sea lions with dogs or dolphins. The concept studies show rule learning, the beat study shows timing, and the memory studies show recall over years. Below: what each study did, and what it does not show.

Key takeaways

• Concepts: after training on two linked sets of 30 problems, a California sea lion matched shapes it had never been trained to pair. In 28 of 30 tests it carried what it knew about one shape over to the others in its class.
• Memory: one adult female kept an equivalence concept after about 1 year and an identity-matching concept after about 10 years, with no drop in performance on the first.
• Rhythm: Ronan learned to match her head movements to a beat at 80 and 120 beats per minute, then kept time at tempos she had not been trained on, and with music.
• Not shown: a sea lion IQ, or any test that puts sea lions and dogs or dolphins on the same task.

How smart are sea lions?

Smart by the tests that exist. Sea lion intelligence has been studied in laboratory experiments on a small number of trained California sea lions. Each result shows that sea lions can do something. None shows how typical any one sea lion is.

That limit matters. The studies below used one or two animals each, over years, with a lot of training. A result like that proves the ability is possible. It is not a score, and it does not rank sea lions against other species.

Can sea lions form concepts?

Yes, in a laboratory test of one kind of concept. California sea lions grouped shapes into classes by a rule, a skill called equivalence. Before these studies it had been shown mainly in people who use language.

Here is how the test works. A sea lion is trained that shape A goes with shape B, and that B goes with C. If it then picks A when shown B, or C when shown A, on the very first try, it has built a class (A, B, C). Nobody taught it those last pairings.

In a 1998 paper, Schusterman and Kastak report that their sea lion did exactly this after training on 30 problems of each kind. It then passed 28 of 30 tests in which a response learned to one shape was carried over at once to the others in its class.

Later papers widened the result. Kastak, Schusterman and Kastak (2001) showed that two sea lions could sort stimuli into functional classes, and that class-specific food rewards could themselves become members of a class. Kastak and Schusterman (2002) worked with two sea lions that had formed two 10-member classes. Given a choice between a known shape from the other class and a new shape, the animals picked the new one. They then grouped new shapes into the right class at once.

Can a sea lion keep a beat?

Yes. A sea lion named Ronan learned to move her head in time to a rhythm. Cook and others (2013) reported it in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, and it tested a theory.

The theory said keeping a beat depends on the brain changes that let an animal copy sounds. Until then, only vocal mimics such as humans, cockatoos and budgerigars had been shown to do it. A sea lion is not a vocal mimic. The team set three tests: the response could not copy the sound, it had to work at tempos not trained, and it had to hold for complex music. Ronan met all three.

The team trained her at 80 and 120 beats per minute. She then kept time at 72, 88, 96, 108 and 132, and with music from 104 to 143.

Rouse and others (2016) tested her again. Ronan was a 7-year-old female who had been placed in captivity around age one after repeated strandings. When the team changed the tempo or the timing mid-stream, she recovered within a few beats. The authors call it the clearest evidence yet that humans and other animals keep a beat in a similar way. That is their reading, and it rests on one animal.

Do sea lions have good memory?

Yes, by two kinds of evidence. A trained sea lion kept concepts for years, and wild sea lions show what happens when the memory area of the brain is damaged.

Reichmuth Kastak and Schusterman (2002) retested an adult female. After about 1 year her equivalence classes showed no decrement. After about 10 years she applied an identity-matching concept at once, to familiar and to new problems. The authors call these the first reports of long-term conceptual memory in a nonprimate species.

The wild study is of a different kind. Cook and others (2015) studied a large sample of wild sea lions. Spatial memory deficits were predicted by damage to the right dorsal hippocampus from natural exposure to a toxin made by algae, domoic acid. Because sea lions forage and navigate flexibly, the authors note that poor spatial memory may affect survival. Our memory game lets you test your own recall.

How big is a sea lion's brain, and how does it compare with a dog's or a dolphin's?

We found no published brain weight or neuron count for a sea lion that we could read, so we give no figure and make no comparison. Any number that puts a sea lion’s brain beside a dog’s or a dolphin’s needs a source.

What we did read is about structure. A 2009 magnetic resonance study of a live California sea lion found more secondary folds in the brain than in the brains of terrestrial carnivores, a small olfactory bulb and a strikingly large pineal gland. The authors say their volumes are the first for any pinniped. Brain size, as our post on T rex brain size shows with a dinosaur, is also not a score.

Are sea lions smarter than dogs or dolphins?

Nobody knows. A fair sea lion vs dolphin intelligence comparison needs one task for both. As far as we found, no study has run one task on sea lions, dogs and dolphins. Every claim of “smarter than” comes from different tests, different animals and different training.

For the species that have been tested, read our pages on dog IQ, dolphins and orcas. Our smartest animals study and the report on the smartest animal in the ocean set out what has been measured across species. Squid and sharks have their own posts too: are squid smart and are sharks smart.

What about seals?

Seals, sea lions and walruses are all pinnipeds. We read no seal experiment like the sea lion ones above, so we give no seal figures. The one review we read, by Reichmuth and Casey (2014) on vocal learning, says studies of seals, sea lions and walruses show vocal development and plasticity, and even imitation of complex sounds.

Is there a sea lion IQ?

No. IQ ranks people against other people of the same age, and no test or norm group like that exists for sea lions. Any “sea lion IQ” number is invented. Without one, the question can only be answered study by study, as above. To see what a score means for a person, read our post on an IQ of 127, or take the IQ test.

Quick answers

• How smart are sea lions? Smart by the tests that exist. A California sea lion matched shapes it had never been taught to pair, and one remembered a concept after about 10 years.
• Can sea lions keep a beat? One did. Ronan, a California sea lion, matched her head bobs to a beat at new tempos and to music (Cook and others, 2013).
• Do sea lions have good memory? Yes. One kept an equivalence concept for about 1 year and an identity concept for about 10 years.
• Are sea lions smarter than dogs? Nobody knows. No study gave the same task to both.
• What is a sea lion’s IQ? There is none. No IQ test exists for sea lions.

Sources

• Schusterman RJ, Kastak D (1998). Functional equivalence in a California sea lion: relevance to animal social and communicative interactions. Animal Behaviour 55(5), 1087-1095 (abstract read).
• Kastak CR, Schusterman RJ, Kastak D (2001). Equivalence classification by California sea lions using class-specific reinforcers. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 76(2), 131-158 (abstract read).
• Kastak CR, Schusterman RJ (2002). Sea lions and equivalence: expanding classes by exclusion. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 78(3), 449-465 (abstract read).
• Reichmuth Kastak C, Schusterman RJ (2002). Long-term memory for concepts in a California sea lion. Animal Cognition 5(4), 225-232 (abstract read).
• Cook P, Rouse A, Wilson M, Reichmuth C (2013). A California sea lion can keep the beat: motor entrainment to rhythmic auditory stimuli in a non vocal mimic. Journal of Comparative Psychology 127(4), 412-427 (abstract read).
• Rouse AA, Cook PF, Large EW, Reichmuth C (2016). Beat keeping in a sea lion as coupled oscillation. Frontiers in Neuroscience 10, 257 (open access; full text read).
• Cook PF and others (2015). Algal toxin impairs sea lion memory and hippocampal connectivity, with implications for strandings. Science 350(6267), 1545-1547 (abstract read).
• Montie EW and others (2009). Neuroanatomy and volumes of brain structures of a live California sea lion from magnetic resonance images. The Anatomical Record 292, 1523-1547 (abstract read).
• Reichmuth C, Casey C (2014). Vocal learning in seals, sea lions, and walruses. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 28, 66-71 (abstract read).
• Photo: a sea lion hauled out on a buoy in Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, Matt McIntosh / NOAA, 2014, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.