If I told you scientists taught seals to play video games, that might be enough to satisfy you. I mean, who doesn’t want video-game-playing Seals? But let me explain why you’d want to do this beyond just entertaining us and the seals…

Seals play an ocean simulation video game in an experiment to understand how they navigate underwater at the

How do you find out how seals navigate?

Seals regularly dive 550m below surface. Down there, the water is dark and cloudy, so scientists wondered, how do they navigate?

Researchers at the University of Rostock in Germany set up an experiment to find out. They trained two seals to press left or right buttons in an ocean simulation and they let one other seal play without training.

what did the setup look like?

The ocean simulation looks kind of like the star wars stars streaming towards you. The “remote” consisted of a big button for the seals to press with their nose on either side. There was also a simulation where the moving dots were either only above / at the top of screen to represent the water’s surface, or only below below, representing the seabed.

Watching these digital dots move by you is called “optic flow perception”

The researchers trained the seals to indicate which side they thought they were moving towards with buttons, and don’t worry, the subjects got rewarded with their hard work with some nice juicy fish.

How did the seals do?

The two trained seals learned very quickly, while the naive seal was slower but picked up eventually. After some initial errors, all seals became very competent at telling which direction the screen was leading them in.

So what did we learn?

This experiment shows that seals can use they way objects move past their eyes to navigate. It may seem trivial but we had no idea how seals navigated before this so it’s quite a big step forward!

What are the next steps?

The researchers say they’d like to figure out if they can also track how far they’ve travelled. Overall, this work gives us a better understanding of underwater vision in animals, and might result in future underwater vision applications for devices.

As covered in a segment on the Daily Tech News Show on June 11th 2025. For a more detailed discussion of the topic, listen here:

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News: https://www.science.org/content/article/ocean-simulation-game-reveals-how-seals-navigate-underwater 

Article DOI: https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.250766