There was a time when cat memes ruled the internet. But the animal memes keep changing. This week, the viral-spiral trend on Instagram and TikTok was something else.
If you have good taste as I do, your feed is likely infested with barking, bleating sea lions. Instagram seems to have crowned this silly creature the ‘it’ animal of 2026.
Zoo handlers laid the groundwork as early as February 2025, posting videos where sea lions performed tricks and showed off their goofy smiles. Then came videos where the pinniped did nothing but yell at the top of its voice—half bleating goat, half mooing cow. You can see how the youth got hooked—the noise speaks to some deep recesses of the soul.
As if watching wasn’t enough, people have started mimicking the animal. And on Thursday, a South African band posted a song made using sea lion noises. “Do you want the fishy? Ooo aah ooo,” sings the lead vocalist. “AAAAAAAAA,” screeches the sea lion.
Sea lions aren’t seals
If you’re picturing chubby, furry softballs that love to flap their bellies, you’ve got it all wrong. Those are seals—they’re cute. But sea lions are downright wacky. They’re also less furry, much more agile, and at least twice as likely to yell at the top of their voice.
The videos follow a standard script. If the sea lion isn’t letting out a belting scream, it’s clapping its long flippers, jumping from side to side, or poking out its tongue like a silly cat. As one of the commenters wrote, it is “God’s most unserious creation”. No wonder many see it as a kindred spirit.
One video from November 2025 features a sea lion with big blank eyes staring right into the camera as it lets out a loud bark. Then it swivels its head from side to side and does a few jumps, bouncing from one flipper to another. The Reel has over 2 crore likes and more than 1 lakh comments.
“He’s just like me fr (for real),” wrote one fan. Another posed a deeper question: “Why did he do that?”
In another video posted in December 2025, the sea lion seems to want to show off all its tricks. It pokes out its tongue, then flips its ‘tail’ from side to side, then bobs its head, then claps in between jumps, like a gym bro showing off during push-ups. “Why it bro spamming emotes,” read the text on screen, with a crying emoji.
Across videos, “emote” keeps popping up in comments. Forget movies; if you want to witness the whole range of human emotions, sea lion videos are the place to be. Botox and iPhone faces are yet to catch up with these performers.
A recent trend is from a zoo where handlers prank sea lions with eggplants that look like fish. An excited sea lion slides up to the eggplant, noses at it, then looks up at the camera with utter betrayal—before letting out a loud bark.
The internet is obsessed. One commenter, however, has a darker view of things. “The algorithm is pushing the Sea Lion content to mitigate the rise in interest in beavers, which are a vital part of marshland ecosystems,” wrote Prashant Sarkar.
Nice try, Prashant. Come back when beavers can make goofy faces and spin their bodies around like blubbery fidget spinners.
Of cats & capybaras
It all began with cat videos. Did you know that the world’s oldest cat video was made by Thomas Edison’s company in 1894? It’s a silent film called Boxing Cats, where two cats wearing boxing gloves fight each other in a ring—it looks eerily like an AI cat video.
Cats have ruled the internet since their YouTube days. Even when AI memes first popped up, they capitalised on the universal appeal of the furry gremlins. But after two decades, even watching tiny demons wreak devastation upon household items gets boring.
We tried to make do with pandas, penguins, and the occasional Moo Deng. But nothing really hit—until the great 2022 capybara craze. The majestic rodent captured hearts because it was friends with monkeys and crocodiles alike: it was zen in a doomed world.
But if the rise of the sea lion shows anything, it’s that we’re done with chill vibes. It’s firmly and undeniably the era of chaotic whimsy.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)