Ronan the sea lion can dance to a lot of different songs, but there is something about “Boogie Wonderland,” by Earth, Wind and Fire that really gets her going.

It didn’t take more than a few days for Peter Cook, a marine mammal sciences professor at the New College of Florida, to train Ronan to bop her head to music . Using fish as a reward, he taught her the movement. Then he taught her to move when a metronome played. Over the course of the next two months, he gave her a fish every time she synchronized her head bops to the beat of the music. Once that clicked, she could do it 60 times in a row within a couple of days, he said.

Before long, she was able to do this with music recorded live in a studio with natural fluctuations, complex instrumentation and syncopation, meaning differ

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