I’m going to respectfully disagree, if you watch the video you cited: Sea Lion Show Part 1 - YouTube at 0:42 to 0:43, what stops the rolling of the ball as it is passed from one sea lion to the other? I don’t see the catching sea lion moving far enough to stage right to cancel the ball’s spin…
Or if you watch this video: Sea Lion Balancing Ball Act - YouTube at 0:12 to 0:13 where the ball is perched on the sea lion’s nose, but is listing to one side - especially the latter it looks as though the ball should fall off to the sea lion’s left. I suspect (but lacking tactile evidence, I can’t demonstrate it) that the vibrissae are providing enough resistance to stop the rolling of the ball. They’re certainly firm enough to do so with light objects.
I worked closely with sea lions at a rehabilitation facility for three years, and while I’ve never trained them to do this trick (or any other trick,) the whiskers are about as strong and stiff as 22 gauge steel wire; they’re certainly capable of supporting some weight and enabling the sea lion to cancel a ball’s spin and roll when catching it.
It’s possible that I’m wrong, after all, interpreting Youtube videos is problematic at best, and close to useless for something like this. We’d really have to get someone who is within a couple of feet of the sea lion when training or performing. The facility I worked with assisted a display facility with training of vet techs and such - I’ll see if I can find any trainers through my network to get their first-hand opinion.
I’ve worked enough with sea lions and seen enough of them in the wild (since leaving the rehabilitation facility I’ve worked on and off as a naturalist on whale watching trips) to see them do incredible things, like do a barrel roll while bouncing off the hull of a moving boat, and to see them do silly things, like try to flop up onto a buoy and miss by two vertical feet. As with humans and other animals, things they practice a lot can get awe-inspiring, and in other aspects of their lives they can be clumsy just like one of us.
You might be right - there does appear to be at least some damping of motion happening there, but I’m still not sure - sometimes, an actively/reactively balanced system can deceptively appear to have support that simply isn’t there (for example: Segway)
I’m not seeing what you’re seeing. To me, the ball only looks like it is listing because the segmented pattern of colours on it is rotated out of true.
The stiffness of the bristles I have no doubt of; the force moment that can be applied to them is the concern - they’re essentially levers that (I presume) are anchored in the animal’s face for maybe one tenth of the equivalent external length - to exert a force with the tip of the whisker would require the application of ten times the same force by the muscle that is moving the whisker - are they capable of that?
You could be right - it is almost impossible to tell from youtube. I’ve sent off an email to a sea lion trainer - hopefully we’ll get an answer.
I have no idea. I’d imagine that if force is being applied by a whisker it’s centered closer to the base of the whisker than the end. I’d imagine that a response from someone who’s seen the action up close is the only way to verify this.
That would be good - it’s really the muscular strength of the whiskers that’s at question - they’re sensory organs - but I guess they could be capable of more force than I first imagined - if, for example, they are adapted to be able to be extended forward whilst swimming fast underwater - even though they’re thin, there would need to be reasonable muscular strength for that.
I think it’s probably also worth thinking about our parameters - our mental image is of a Sea Lion balancing an inflatable beach ball - It wouldn’t surprise me if that could rest on the whiskers - but in most of those videos, the object being balanced is actually a basketball or similar. Those are pretty heavy.
In wevets second video, that sea lion seems to be traveling forward awfully fast to merely be balancing the ball. I could be wrong.
I agree the vibrasse are acting as sensory organs to help the sea lion react, but I think the stiffness is contributing to control a bit as well. Though the sea lions do move their heads about in response to the ball, so I don’t think the vibrasse are strong enough to support fully on their own. That is to say, how far out of balance from directly over the nose to leaning on the whiskers can the whiskers counter? Maybe they can take a 1 degree lean but not a 10 degree lean.
They do just perch the ball on a basket of stiff whiskers. Although keeping the nose under the center of mass must help, so they would get good at that too.
At one dolphin and sea-lion show I saw in Florida, the audience was able to watch up close, and the trainer explained that. They can move the vibrissae back or forward, and make a basket with them to hold the ball.
Now try to imagine a dolphin doing that, without any vibrissae at all. Circa 1983 (give or take a years, as best I remember), at the annual week-long symposium of the International Marine Animal Trainers Association (IMATA), they gave an award for the “behavior of the year” to some dolphin show (I don’t remember which) for having trained a dolphin to balance a ball on the tip if its snout – they showed a video of it at the meeting. Now that was seriously impressive.
(ETA: At the lab where I worked, one evening one of the trainers, just for the fun of it, showed one of the dolphins how to twirl a frisbee on its snout. The dolphin must have thought that was a kick, and spent most of that night and the next several days and nights twirling a frisbee on its snout. After just the first few hours of that, the other dolphin picked it up just from watching the first one, and then they were both twirling frisbees.)
More ETA: They could also toss frisbees, with surprisingly good aim. But I never, not even once, ever saw either of them even try to catch one – although they were good at catching and tossing volleyballs.
I went through a few a few long replies but when I went back I always found I got sidetracked.
They are smart, we are smart, just like all animals if there is a bond of trust and the animal is smart there is very little it cannot do. I am not sure on dolphins personally, not sure where they sit but up there with apes, monkeys, cats, dogs, pigs, rats and ravens.
I am having a hard time coming up with an evolutionary reason. The two I have both do not seem quite there. Shellfish, giant clams, oysters, or a dead fish they killed. All of these would have to be brought to the surfave to eat. Defense, with the air they are holding and the shear power I bet I straight up nose punch would have a lot of power. I have not seen footage of them working in a group but a few using the bouyancey of the air in their lungs along with thier flippers should be able to punch an orca har…really hard. Dolphins can defend agains larger enemies but they lack in one area…adaptation. Populations can go crazy and they have little fear so they can be a pest. If they learn not to sit at the damn on the Columbia River within another year or so, but come up with another strat I will be impressed but not really surprised.
There’s no evolutionary reason for them to balance balls. It’s a skill - a learned behaviour. The things that evolution has contributed are: fast reactions, keen senses, a supple neck and (as some are asserting) strong, movable, sensitive whiskers.
All of those things are useful for pursuing prey underwater.
I got a response from a sea lion trainer at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, and he agrees with you, the sea lion is not in fact supporting any of the ball’s weight on its whiskers. He mentioned that with lighter objects, balloons and such, that might work, but the trick is usually done with a heavier basketball or volleyball, and that’s too much weight for the vibrissae to support any significant fraction of it.
Cheers for having me check the dusty corners of my mind against reality, Mangetout, it’s healthy to reexamine things you’ve been told a long time ago or possibly misremembered!
I am the original poster of this question. I find the discussion fascinating. It was difficult for me to phrase the question, originally. Maybe I should have asked whether the ability (balancing a ball) is based on any natural behavior. "Tricks " are often based on natural behavior (dolphins high-jumping is an obvious example). Anyway, the discussion of HOW they do it proved just as interesting as why they can do it.
This whole thread is an example of what Oliver Sacks called the “Wallace Problem,” after Alfred Wallace. Wallace independently came up with a theory of evolution that was nearly identical to that of Darwin and was throughout his life one of its most ardent defenders. Yet, there were, in his view, a few phenomenons that he felt could not be fully explained by evolution. Specifically, he thought that our ability to read was what the intelligent design crowd now call “irreducibly complex.”
However, Wallace had it backwards. Our brains didn’t evolve to read; writing systems evolved to be read. In other words, we’re able to read because it’s a task that’s designed to maximise abilities that do have evolutionary advantages, like foraging for food or communicating.
The same thing can be said about sea lions balancing balls. It’s a task that was chosen for them. You won’t see sea lions riding bicycles or playing the guitar.
Thanks for researching this and posting back - I guess this makes the balancing act all the more astonishing - because there are moments when the ball does just look like it’s resting/fixed in place.
It’s rather interesting that two quite unrelated marine mammals, sea lions and dolphins, can do this trick. I’m wondering if it may be related to their need to make extremely rapid darting movements in order to catch fish. Dogs can balance objects on the bridge of their nose after a fashion, but not really on the tip like a sea lion or dolphin can. (Maybe some have been trained to do so, but it’s not a typical dog trick like it is for sea lions.) I don’t think it’s a typical trick for any terrestrial mammals, which don’t have to make the same kind of darting movements needed to catch fish.
Also interesting is that dolphins have been observed in the wild using sponges as fishing tools perched on their rostra - they’re not balancing them against gravity like they do with the balls in captivity, but the faster you move with something on your rostrum, I’d guess the more similar it is to balancing something against gravity.
Sea lions have not been observed doing anything like this to my knowledge, but I’d guess that Colibri is right - the rapid sensory response and target-following needed to catch fast-moving fish gives sea lions the basic anatomy and neurology to perform the trick, so it’s easy for humans to co-opt those systems in captivity to get the performance out of the animal.
While I would pay a great deal to see a (humanely-treated) sea lion play the harp, the flippers might be a bit awkward for most harps designed for human hands.
