Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb. We are on vacation this week,
Speaker 1: so it's a great time to go ahead. And Rea
Speaker 1: air all three parts of our You've Got Femail series.
Speaker 1: This is part one of three and originally published five
Speaker 1: point fifteen twenty five.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to
Speaker 3: Blow Your Mind, we are going to begin a series
Speaker 3: of episodes on a weird and interesting medium of communication
Speaker 3: between animals, specifically communication by means of urine. I've said
Speaker 3: this before on the show, but I think humans are
Speaker 3: really a species defined by the power and complexity of
Speaker 3: our communication skills. There is a lot that makes humankind unique,
Speaker 3: but communication, I think is the thing that makes us
Speaker 3: most unique among the animals. When we want to share
Speaker 3: information about the world or about our intentions with another person,
Speaker 3: we've got so many options. We can talk out loud,
Speaker 3: we can use body language or sign language. We can
Speaker 3: draw represent ideas visually. We can use written language, which
Speaker 3: of course that you know has as a million different
Speaker 3: instantiations and different types of technology today. So you've got
Speaker 3: everything from you know, the handwritten note, to mass media
Speaker 3: like books and magazines, email, text messages, social media posts.
Speaker 3: I guess some people are probably still facts and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but mostly we've got it reduced down to texting.
Speaker 1: I think in general, we can throw all these things
Speaker 1: out the window and we're just going to focus on
Speaker 1: texting from here on out for the duration.
Speaker 3: I only want to read books in SMS format now.
Speaker 3: But I think gets easy because we have such mastery
Speaker 3: over communication and communication technology to kind of not notice
Speaker 3: media of communication that are not available to us, or
Speaker 3: at least not usually. I love thinking about other media
Speaker 3: of information sharing which do exist in nature, but which
Speaker 3: are not used by humans, at least not consciously. And
Speaker 3: it turns out a huge, pretty much unignorable example used
Speaker 3: throughout the animal kingdom is urine communication through.
Speaker 1: P That's right, And as we get into this topic,
Speaker 1: I'd encourage everyone out there to set aside their narrow
Speaker 1: human understanding of urine as much as possible and open
Speaker 1: your mind to the extent that we can to the
Speaker 1: richer world of informational micturition. Giggling is still permitted, but
Speaker 1: rethink you're in a bed. As we proceed here.
Speaker 3: To get us started, I wanted to mention a recent
Speaker 3: zoology story that first got me thinking about doing this
Speaker 3: topic on the show. It was a paper published this
Speaker 3: year in the journal Behavioral Processes by three researchers named
Speaker 3: Clariana Arujo Wang, Mauricio Kanter, and John Y. Wang, and
Speaker 3: the paper was called aerial Urination suggests an undescribed sensory
Speaker 3: modality and social function in river dolphins. So a bit
Speaker 3: on the authors here. At least one of the authors
Speaker 3: is affiliated with a river dolphin research project in Brazil
Speaker 3: called Botos do Serrado, another with the Marine Mammal Institute
Speaker 3: of Oregon State University in the United States, and the
Speaker 3: third with Trent University in Ontario, Canada.
Speaker 4: I believe they were all.
Speaker 3: Associated to some extent with a research group called Cetasia
Speaker 3: Cetasia based in Canada, but this stot he concerns individuals
Speaker 3: of the species any Jeffrentsis, also known as the boto
Speaker 3: or the pink river dolphin or the Amazon river dolphin.
Speaker 3: Rob Have we ever done a long look at river
Speaker 3: dolphins on the show? I don't think, so, I.
Speaker 1: Don't believe we have. I imagine a lot of you
Speaker 1: have seen images of them as we'll describe here. Do
Speaker 1: not just picture any other sort of dolphin and just
Speaker 1: color it pink in your mind, because the reality here
Speaker 1: is a bit different.
Speaker 3: Yeah, these aren't just your bottle noes. This has a
Speaker 3: distinctly alt dolphin feel.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 3: The Amazon River dolphin is the world's largest species of
Speaker 3: freshwater dolphin, with males growing up to two point five
Speaker 3: meters in length and one hundred and eighty five kilograms.
Speaker 3: Adult females are somewhat smaller than that. They look fairly
Speaker 3: distinct from marine dolphins, with long, skinny snouts without a
Speaker 3: pronounced dorsal fin like you would see on bottlenose dolphins.
Speaker 3: You kind of don't appreciate how much the dorsal fin
Speaker 3: really contributes to the animal's profile until you see a
Speaker 3: dolphin without one. It's not that it doesn't have a
Speaker 3: dorsal fin, but it's more of a hump. Bodos have
Speaker 3: kind of a if you're looking at them from the side,
Speaker 3: imagine a kind of plateau silhouette along the back with
Speaker 3: a mid length corner gently sloping down to the tail.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I just find they do just look bizarre.
Speaker 1: They To me, they kind of look like if the
Speaker 1: cenobytes made a dolphin, you know, like out of a person.
Speaker 1: That's the kind of vibe I get off of a
Speaker 1: pink river dolphin. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I hope this doesn't come off as hostile to them,
Speaker 3: because they're wonderful creatures, but there is a there is
Speaker 3: a suggestion of gore in their appearance. There's something a
Speaker 3: little bit, a little bit squicky kind of but also
Speaker 3: they've got a little smile sometimes. Have you seen this
Speaker 3: in different pictures where if you look at the head
Speaker 3: just right, it looks like they're they're giving you a
Speaker 3: grin that's I don't know, it's a little creepy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's a little easier to take that
Speaker 1: grin from a bottle nose dolphin. And part of it,
Speaker 1: I'm just not used to seeing these guys. I guess,
Speaker 1: you know, they're beautiful in their own right, but they're
Speaker 1: also they're a little bit weird.
Speaker 3: So bodos are found not just in the Amazon River,
Speaker 3: but in rivers throughout northern and central South America. I
Speaker 3: believe they're in the Orinoco Basin as well, and at
Speaker 3: least one other major river system. Bodos tend to be
Speaker 3: more gray in color when they're young, but then adults,
Speaker 3: especially the males, take on this blotchy pink color as
Speaker 3: they mature. I've read in some sources that the pinkness
Speaker 3: might be associated with places on the skin where there
Speaker 3: have been sort of bumps or abrasions or wounds on
Speaker 3: the skin over the years, but I think that's not
Speaker 3: for certain. There seem to be interesting questions about all
Speaker 3: of the environmental factors that determine the Amazon River dolphins pinkness.
Speaker 3: It might also have to do with the opacity of
Speaker 3: the water they live in, or with water temperature, or
Speaker 3: maybe a few other things. This is not fully settled,
Speaker 3: but anyway, I was just reading a few other things
Speaker 3: about this species, generally in a twenty sixteen feature put
Speaker 3: out by the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Speaker 3: written by someone named Kirsten Fernlely, and this article mentions
Speaker 3: that many other dolphin species have a fused spine, but
Speaker 3: bodos do not, and a bodo's unfused spine allows it
Speaker 3: to actually turn its head from side to side, which
Speaker 3: might not sound remarkable to you until you see a
Speaker 3: picture of a dolphin turning its head to look at you. Yep,
Speaker 3: pretty weird, rob, I've got a picture in the outline
Speaker 3: for you to look at this. Dolphins it's like saying.
Speaker 1: Hi, Yeah, it's a little bit creepy.
Speaker 3: Like other dolphins, bodos also use echolocation to navigate their
Speaker 3: environment and to hunt, so that means emitting low frequency
Speaker 3: clicks or slaps from a fatty organ on the head
Speaker 3: called the melon, and then listening for the bounce back
Speaker 3: to get information about their surroundings, which they sense with
Speaker 3: sensory organs in their lower jaw. Especially, bodos apparently eat
Speaker 3: lots of different kinds of prey fish, crustaceans, reptiles which
Speaker 3: they catch in their long jaws. They apparently have different
Speaker 3: kinds of teeth in the front and the back of
Speaker 3: the jaws. So if you see one of them with
Speaker 3: the mouth open toward the front of the jaws or
Speaker 3: this elongated snout, they'll have kind of pointy teeth which
Speaker 3: are the grabber teeth that's for catching you and not
Speaker 3: letting you go, And then they've got grinding teeth farther
Speaker 3: back in the mouth so that's your destiny if you're
Speaker 3: a crab and one of these things digs you up
Speaker 3: from the river bottom. Level of socialization among botos seems variable.
Speaker 3: Sometimes they will gather in groups, especially if feeding there's
Speaker 3: a lot of feeding resources nearby. Sometimes you will see
Speaker 3: them in mother calf pairs, but it seems most often
Speaker 3: adults live alone, the solitary species.
Speaker 1: Now, I was curious about the mythology and the legends
Speaker 1: concerning the Boto, so I looked into this a little bit.
Speaker 1: The name Boto is of Portuguese origin, but the indigenous
Speaker 1: peoples of the Amazon and beyond knew of them long
Speaker 1: before the arrival of Europeans. Naturally, unfortunately, not much seems
Speaker 1: to have survived concerning exactly how those people in pre
Speaker 1: Columbian times interpreted them in their folklore and myths. But
Speaker 1: we might reasonably infer that there could be some connection
Speaker 1: between what was believed in those days and more modern
Speaker 1: folkloric beliefs about these river dolphins. But the modern stories
Speaker 1: are pretty alarming, as pointed out in Amazon River Dolphin
Speaker 1: Love Fetishes from Folklore to molecular Forensics by Gravina at All.
Speaker 1: This is published in Marine Mammal Science, two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: The common folk belief one encounters is that the Boto
Speaker 1: is a shape shifting seducer, or worse, the Boto can
Speaker 1: transform itself into a handsome Caucasian male to dance boldly
Speaker 1: and seduce women. They are also said to enter homes
Speaker 1: at night and paralyze the occupants with their gaze before
Speaker 1: having their way with them. And then it dawned, the
Speaker 1: Boto must return to the water into its natural form.
Speaker 1: The authors here point out that in some regions the
Speaker 1: Boto legend is used to explain certain teenage pregnancies that occur,
Speaker 1: and more generally, I've seen the legend explain as something
Speaker 1: that was originally a warning against the dangers posed by
Speaker 1: male colonists in potential sexual violence. The nib dot com
Speaker 1: has a really good webcomic about this, if anyone wants
Speaker 1: to explore that. But associated with these traditions are also
Speaker 1: sometimes practices of using body parts of the Boto as
Speaker 1: fetish items. The eye can be held. Some of these
Speaker 1: traditions hold while conversing with a romantic interest, because the
Speaker 1: power of their gaze is irresistible, and so you can
Speaker 1: get some of that power to rub off on ether.
Speaker 1: And then there are other traditions where one might take
Speaker 1: the dried, pulverized genitalia of one of these river dolphins
Speaker 1: and then mix it with talcum powder or perfume and
Speaker 1: then apply that to your own genitals as a magic
Speaker 1: pleasure or fertility boosting powder. The authors in that paper
Speaker 1: I sided, they point out there are regional variations, as
Speaker 1: we've touched on, like there's ultimately a lot of territory
Speaker 1: covered by the range of the Boto, and that range
Speaker 1: is going to cover a lot of variety. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of variety and active, active cultural influences to be
Speaker 1: found in these regions. And so when some areas there
Speaker 1: are indigenous beliefs that the photo is too sacred to kill,
Speaker 1: while in other areas there has traditionally been more of
Speaker 1: a practice of killing them for their body parts and
Speaker 1: so forth. But the bottom line is the Boto possibly
Speaker 1: a terrifying shape shifting seducer, and maybe this has something
Speaker 1: to do with its coloration and it's kind of fleshy
Speaker 1: aspect of its body. Maybe that's what leads to some
Speaker 1: of these some variations of these beliefs that it can
Speaker 1: take on the form of a human being.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the idea that there is something of blood about it,
Speaker 3: or maybe something about it being able to kind of
Speaker 3: turn and look at you, I wonder possibly.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: But anyway, coming to the scientific paper we're going to
Speaker 3: talk about, this will give you another very different.
Speaker 4: Way to think about the bodo.
Speaker 3: So in this paper from Behavioral Processes in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 3: again that's a ruho wang at all, the authors describe
Speaker 3: recent observations, or actually not that recent, it's from a
Speaker 3: few years back. I'll talk about that in a second.
Speaker 3: Describe their observations of this behavior among bodos, which they
Speaker 3: call aerial urination. Another way to put it would be
Speaker 3: pea fountains. So the pea fountain behaviors documented in this
Speaker 3: research took place among wild botos in a river in
Speaker 3: central Brazil called the Tokentines between September twenty fourteen and
Speaker 3: March twenty eighteen, and the observations were recorded from fifteen
Speaker 3: meters high observation platforms at the water's edge. So the
Speaker 3: pea fountain behavior, here's how it goes down. You got
Speaker 3: one male boto. Originally it turns upside down at the
Speaker 3: surface of the river, with its underside facing the sky
Speaker 3: and its penis sticking up above the water line. Then
Speaker 3: it starts to pee, projecting an arc of urine into
Speaker 3: the air, generally about three feet long, which splashes down
Speaker 3: into the water nearby. Usually while creating this pea fountain,
Speaker 3: the boto will continue swimming, sometimes in a straight line,
Speaker 3: sometimes zigzagging back and forth, sometimes looping around in a circle.
Speaker 3: And this by itself could be seen as a strange
Speaker 3: and interesting behavior, like why take the trouble to flip
Speaker 3: upside down and pee into the sky? Like why would
Speaker 3: you try to make your urine cross the barrier of
Speaker 3: worlds into the unswimmable air? Why not just do it
Speaker 3: straight into the water and go about your business?
Speaker 1: I know humans would never, right, so why would the dolphins?
Speaker 3: I was exactly trying to think about when humans would
Speaker 3: make a point to like submertin just barely submerge their
Speaker 3: bodies under the water in order to pee. I guess
Speaker 3: the main reason I could think humans would do that
Speaker 3: would be for like various forms of modesty, like in
Speaker 3: order to not be seen peeing or not be heard
Speaker 3: or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think that's that's a fine point. I
Speaker 1: would also argue, and again we're comparing dolphins with humans,
Speaker 1: which is closer comparison to be made than humans do
Speaker 1: various other animals, but humans. When humans have the ability
Speaker 1: to aim and control their your ow nation streams, they
Speaker 1: are liable to do novel things with their control within
Speaker 1: the acceptable environment that they are urinating. I would bring
Speaker 1: to mind occasionally one might see a target in a
Speaker 1: urinal that sort of thing, sure, and that would encourage
Speaker 1: one to aim for the target and so forth. Or
Speaker 1: maybe one is urinating in the wild and there is
Speaker 1: like one rock that calls out more than other rocks.
Speaker 3: Sure, that's yeah, uh huh, I see what you're saying.
Speaker 3: So it can be a form of play or self.
Speaker 4: Amusement in a way.
Speaker 3: And dolphins, you know, dolphins are intelligent animals. You think
Speaker 3: that they might just maybe sometimes they do things just
Speaker 3: to play, just kind of for a novelty of the behavior.
Speaker 4: So there would be.
Speaker 3: Interesting questions even if it was just the aerial urine stream.
Speaker 3: But here's where it gets even more interesting. The authors
Speaker 3: of this paper observed that two thirds of the time,
Speaker 3: sixty seven percent of the time one male river dolphin
Speaker 3: did this. It happened to be when there was another
Speaker 3: male right there, right nearby, which the authors called the
Speaker 3: receiver of the aerial urination. And what's more, the receiver
Speaker 3: dolphin would often appear not to avoid the stream. Sometimes
Speaker 3: it would just stay where it was in the water,
Speaker 3: basically right under where the stream was hitting. But often
Speaker 3: it would appear to deliberately chase the stream of urine
Speaker 3: and try to get under it. So really the dolphins
Speaker 3: would be going out of their way to get peed on,
Speaker 3: it appears to be, yes, and not just to get
Speaker 3: peed on, to get peed on in the face. So
Speaker 3: the other male dolphin here will approach the place where
Speaker 3: the airborne stream is splashing down, and it will stick
Speaker 3: its head up out of the water to let the
Speaker 3: urine splash down and run over its rostrum, which is
Speaker 3: what the dolphin's protruding beak like jaw is called.
Speaker 1: Again, humans would never so what's going on with these
Speaker 1: river dolphins.
Speaker 3: We don't have to make too many analogies to humans
Speaker 3: and the positive or negative. No judgment here, but yes,
Speaker 3: not a common behavior among humans at least we would think.
Speaker 1: Right, And as we've been trying to relate here, urine
Speaker 1: is not just urine to animals outside of the human domain.
Speaker 1: Urine can be informational, that's right.
Speaker 4: So that brings us to the question.
Speaker 3: Of why do they do this? Why would the dolphin
Speaker 3: pee this way? And why would the other dolphin seek
Speaker 3: the urine stream and try to get its face position
Speaker 3: its own face into the urine stream. To be clear,
Speaker 3: we don't know the answer to this question.
Speaker 4: It is.
Speaker 3: This is not settled, but the authors do try to
Speaker 3: make an informed guess. They say, the most likely explanation
Speaker 3: is its communication. The dolphin that peas in the air
Speaker 3: is in a sense talking, and the dolphin it seeks
Speaker 3: out the stream of urine is listening. Now, what would
Speaker 3: they be talking about. Possibly it would be the dolphins
Speaker 3: quote social position and physical condition, which in fact is
Speaker 3: very important information that male dolphins seek about each other
Speaker 3: in order to navigate competition between one another, such as
Speaker 3: competition for food or competition for mates. And this would
Speaker 3: line up with the observation that aerial urination only ever
Speaker 3: took place between males. The urinators were only males and
Speaker 3: the receivers were only males. Now, another question you might
Speaker 3: wonder about is why if this is in fact some
Speaker 3: kind of exchange of information, and we'll get into a
Speaker 3: bit more detail about that in a minute. What's the
Speaker 3: need for the aerial stream why up in the air
Speaker 3: instead of the dolphin just peeing underwater and letting the
Speaker 3: other dolphin, you know, detect it in the water and
Speaker 3: get whatever kind of information they need from it there. Again,
Speaker 3: the answer is unknown, but one idea I read here
Speaker 3: is that since dolphins are acoustically sensitive, the splashing of
Speaker 3: the arc could alert nearby males that someone is pee talking. Now,
Speaker 3: it's kind of like the ringing of the telephone. It
Speaker 3: is alerting you to come get the message, which you
Speaker 3: would receive by getting the p on your face. Again,
Speaker 3: not known, but that's an interesting guess. Because the dolphins,
Speaker 3: they live in a world of sound. They are constantly
Speaker 3: sensing sounds that they themselves amid and bounce back, and
Speaker 3: other types of sounds in the water. So the splashing
Speaker 3: could be that that's a ring tone.
Speaker 1: Ah, Now that is fascinating.
Speaker 3: Another interesting fact I came across. This is actually unconnected
Speaker 3: to the research about aerial urination, but I just wanted
Speaker 3: to connect it because I read them both separately in
Speaker 3: that general article about botos that I was reading from
Speaker 3: the Triple As twenty sixteen. It mentions that bodos are
Speaker 3: sometimes seen swimming upside down, but the author in this
Speaker 3: case connects it to the fact that bodos tend to
Speaker 3: have kind of chubby cheeks, like small eyes and chubby cheeks,
Speaker 3: which some researchers think might give them trouble looking down
Speaker 3: below them in the water, like I can't see down there.
Speaker 3: My cute chubby cheeks are in the way. Thus, maybe
Speaker 3: swimming upside down helps them see what's below them.
Speaker 1: M Okay.
Speaker 3: Again, that may be totally unconnected to the aerial urination behavior,
Speaker 3: but that's another observation of them sometimes just inverting for
Speaker 3: some reason, and this is another possible reason for it. Now,
Speaker 3: coming back to the aerial urination paper, there's the question
Speaker 3: of how the receiver dolphin would be getting information from
Speaker 3: the urine stream, if that is in fact what's happening. Well,
Speaker 3: the authors point out that bodos have special sensitive bristles
Speaker 3: in the rostrum that have already been documented to help
Speaker 3: them search for prey in murky opaque water near river bottoms.
Speaker 3: Rob I tried to find a picture where you could
Speaker 3: see these bristles I did attach one here in the outline.
Speaker 3: They're very small, and most pictures of the Amazon River
Speaker 3: dolphin's mouth are not from real close, but here's one
Speaker 3: where you might kind of be able to see them.
Speaker 3: You see these little tiny white bristles along the edge
Speaker 3: of the mouth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a little bit of stubble, A little bit of stubble.
Speaker 1: I will reiterate that in this picture too. It looks
Speaker 1: kind of like some sort of a twisted cinebite. Yes.
Speaker 1: And this is fascinating as well, because in talking about
Speaker 1: one animal weeding the urine of another, we're often talking
Speaker 1: about the sense of smell being involved. And we'll get
Speaker 1: more into that later, but one of the things about
Speaker 1: dolphins is that dolphins have a somewhat reduced sense of smell.
Speaker 1: We've talked about that before on the show, talking about
Speaker 1: the evolution of various aquatic mammals, and so it makes
Speaker 1: sense that they would have to have some other capabilities in.
Speaker 3: Play, that's right, And so that's what the authors hypothesize here.
Speaker 3: They say that maybeuning and foraging and river mud is
Speaker 3: not the only thing these.
Speaker 4: Bristles are used for.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 3: We hypothesize that the bristles on bodo's rostrums can serve
Speaker 3: a chemical sensory role in detecting urine streams, and that
Speaker 3: aerial urination, often occurring in the presence of other males,
Speaker 3: serves social or communicative functions beyond the physiological need for
Speaker 3: waste elimination. So again, we don't know for sure about this.
Speaker 3: It's just sort of in the early stages of documenting
Speaker 3: this behavior in an organized way and then trying to
Speaker 3: see what we can figure out about it. I think
Speaker 3: you need to do more controlled experiments to try to
Speaker 3: isolate the variables and figure out what it's really doing.
Speaker 4: But if this.
Speaker 3: Communication interpretation is correct, it could be an important exchange
Speaker 3: of information that helps male bodos make decisions about, say,
Speaker 3: whether it's worth it or probably more often not worth
Speaker 3: it to fight with this other mail for access to
Speaker 3: food resources and mating with nearby females. Like it's kind
Speaker 3: of like, here is my medical chart through the taste
Speaker 3: of my urine. This confirms that I am healthy, i
Speaker 3: am free of parasites, I've got plenty of muscle mass,
Speaker 3: and I could put up a good fight. So you
Speaker 3: know you don't want to fight me. You probably get hurt.
Speaker 1: That's a great way of explaining it, because I think
Speaker 1: it's no surprise to any of us that urine contains
Speaker 1: a great deal of information. There's a lot of that
Speaker 1: information that we can discern medically, but to an animal
Speaker 1: that has a heightened sense of one sort or another,
Speaker 1: they're able to read the urine to some degree and
Speaker 1: get information out of it, like who is this guy?
Speaker 1: Who do they think they are? Well, I can't check
Speaker 1: their like, LinkedIn profile or their social media page, but
Speaker 1: I can test their urine and read that for more information.
Speaker 3: Yes, and as we've talked about on the show before,
Speaker 3: it's easy to think about this kind of competition based
Speaker 3: information exchange about fitness and capacity for fighting, to think
Speaker 3: about that as aggressive, which in a way it is.
Speaker 3: But the other way to think about it is that
Speaker 3: this is a good evolutionary compromise that allows animals to
Speaker 3: avoid violence and unnecessary aggression. It's kind of like allowing
Speaker 3: animals to get a sense of like, it's not worth
Speaker 3: fighting here, we can avoid a fight.
Speaker 1: That's a very good point.
Speaker 4: Yes, So if it is indeed.
Speaker 3: The case that the aerial urination of these river dolphins
Speaker 3: is not just about eliminating waste. And it's not just
Speaker 3: a kind of a play behavior or a way of
Speaker 3: seeking novelty, but it is actually about communicating information that
Speaker 3: is used to make judgments about intraspecific competition, competition between
Speaker 3: these members of the same species.
Speaker 4: This would be far.
Speaker 3: From the only example in the animal world. Lots of
Speaker 3: animals use urination to convey information. I was reading an
Speaker 3: article cover this river dolphin paper in Scientific American by
Speaker 3: Gennaro Tauma that came out April eleventh, twenty twenty five.
Speaker 3: And this article quotes a researcher and ecologist at the
Speaker 3: University of Hull in England named Thomas Brethout and Brighteout says, quote,
Speaker 3: animals in general want to learn as much as they
Speaker 3: can about other animals, such as their sex, dominance, species
Speaker 3: and so on. And a lot of information is in
Speaker 3: the urine. In other words, like your urine can really
Speaker 3: serve as a kind of fact sheet about you, which
Speaker 3: may prove useful to both you and to the other
Speaker 3: animal that's reading it. It's not just a one way benefit,
Speaker 3: like it's useful to both parties to have more accurate
Speaker 3: information about each other, and so it can say what
Speaker 3: species am I what sex am I? What health am
Speaker 3: I in? What is my social status within my group?
Speaker 3: Am I socially dominant? It kind of conveys a lot
Speaker 3: of the same information that people would get about another
Speaker 3: person by first by like looking at them, but also
Speaker 3: watching their behavior in a social situation or looking at
Speaker 3: their profile online or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, to your point, it's like, this is the
Speaker 1: kind of reading that even subconsciously, we're giving strangers every
Speaker 1: day as we sort of take them in and you know,
Speaker 1: we're not actually preparing to potentially fight them, but it's
Speaker 1: just the way we're wired right right.
Speaker 3: There is a lot of i think, kind of instinctual
Speaker 3: assessing that we still do even if we are successfully
Speaker 3: like suppressing aggressive impulses and things like this. There's a
Speaker 3: lot of looking at people and there's some subconscious level
Speaker 3: of like reading their fitness to fight you if you
Speaker 3: know you're not hopefully nobody's going to start a fight.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And sometimes you get a little conscious of
Speaker 1: it and it can feel a little creepy. And that's
Speaker 1: when you just turn it on its head and imagine
Speaker 1: that lightsabers were involved. Yeah, And then you get a
Speaker 1: little a little bit removed from the reality of the situation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's still helpful. It's still helpful still let you
Speaker 1: know where you rank.
Speaker 3: But another thing that's interesting about thinking about urine based
Speaker 3: communication is about, you know, about the hypothesized mechanism of
Speaker 3: the bristles on the rostrums, somehow detecting chemical signatures within
Speaker 3: the urine that would be useful information to the dolphin.
Speaker 3: I love this because it causes us to question our
Speaker 3: assumptions about what the different senses are for. Like we
Speaker 3: think of sight as a general purpose sense, site based
Speaker 3: on light provides us with all kinds of information relevant
Speaker 3: to basically every kind of situation in life. It's not
Speaker 3: limited to one type of judgment or assessment you're making. However,
Speaker 3: I think we think of taste in a much narrower way.
Speaker 3: We think of taste as a sense almost entirely confined
Speaker 3: to assessing one the nutritional value and to the toxic
Speaker 3: threat potential of foods.
Speaker 4: So taste tells.
Speaker 3: You, once you have something in your mouth, is it
Speaker 3: a good idea to chew it up and swallow it?
Speaker 3: And then after that, is it a good idea to
Speaker 3: eat some more of the same thing? But there's no
Speaker 3: reason taste needs to be limited to that narrow band
Speaker 3: of questions. I mean, I guess you could say a
Speaker 3: reason a reason based around questions of practicality, like how
Speaker 3: practical is it to get other types of information by taste.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 3: If you're like a land based mammal, maybe not very
Speaker 3: but I don't know. Maybe if you're, say, living in
Speaker 3: the water and trying to get some information about things
Speaker 3: floating around you, maybe it is more practical.
Speaker 1: Or if you're a human geologist, right, we've talked about that.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, so it tastes at least could potentially give
Speaker 3: us all kinds of information having nothing to do with
Speaker 3: the palatability or threat of potential foods. It could even
Speaker 3: potentially give us social information. Orse, I'm not recommending you
Speaker 3: lick people. It's just interesting to sometimes stop and think
Speaker 3: about how contingent the way we apply different senses to
Speaker 3: different kinds of information or situations is. It's evolutionarily contingent.
Speaker 3: It's just based on sort of like how our bodies
Speaker 3: evolved in the kind of environment we live in, and
Speaker 3: it didn't have to be that way. So you can imagine,
Speaker 3: you know, aliens that talk by taste and stuff, and
Speaker 3: there's no there's no contradiction in that.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the more you think too about the close relationship
Speaker 1: between human smell and human taste, the lines get even
Speaker 1: more blurred, because, of course, our sense of smell is
Speaker 1: a big part of our sense of taste, but we
Speaker 1: tend to not think about them being so closely aligned
Speaker 1: when we think about the difference between say, the tasting
Speaker 1: menu at the restaurant and the smells on the subway
Speaker 1: ride to get to that restaurant, where on on some
Speaker 1: level you were kind of tasting the subway car, you know,
Speaker 1: And that's I mean, the senses are just closely linked
Speaker 1: in that regard. So yeah, and then there's also a
Speaker 1: strong case to be made that the sense of smell
Speaker 1: is even a more intimate sensory experience compared to taste.
Speaker 1: So your relationship to the subway car is perhaps in
Speaker 1: some ways closer than that little chocolate morsel was that
Speaker 1: you finally got to at the restaurant. Now, coming back
Speaker 1: to urination, I thought it would be kind of insightful
Speaker 1: to discuss volunteery urination in general, which is something we're
Speaker 1: talking about here. You know, this example of the of
Speaker 1: the dolphins deciding to pee, and then peeing providing that information,
Speaker 1: and then another dolphin decides to go and taste and
Speaker 1: interpret it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good question itself. Why do animal have
Speaker 3: voluntary control over when they do it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is one of those things.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: Obviously, humans urinate regularly. It's just a normal part of
Speaker 1: our daily life, and you're probably not giving it much
Speaker 1: thought unless there's something interfering with normal operating procedure for
Speaker 1: you in one way or another.
Speaker 3: Right, and then, of course, if there is something interfering
Speaker 3: with your ability to pee, it's kind of all you
Speaker 3: can think about.
Speaker 1: Right, right, it becomes highly important. So let's break this down. So,
Speaker 1: first of all, what does it mean to urinate? Naturally?
Speaker 1: It means to discharge urine from the body. Now do
Speaker 1: all animals urinate? Well, I was digging into this bit,
Speaker 1: and it kind of depends how strictly you define everything.
Speaker 1: So birds, to be clear, like monitor lizards, like less lizards, snakes, alligators,
Speaker 1: and crocodiles do not have urinary bladders. Birds don't have
Speaker 1: a urethra and instead excrete everything through the cloaca, and
Speaker 1: as Lewis Bilson explained in a BBC Science Focus shorty quote.
Speaker 1: Mammals remove excess nitrogen from their bodies by converting it
Speaker 1: to a dilute solution of urrea stored in the bladder.
Speaker 1: Birds convert nitrogen to uric acid instead. This is metabolically
Speaker 1: more costly, but saves water and weight as it is
Speaker 1: less toxic and doesn't need to be diluted so much.
Speaker 3: Ah, that's interesting. So the bird's method of ejecting nitrogenist
Speaker 3: nitrogenous waste from the body just has less to do
Speaker 3: with water reserves than it does for us. You know,
Speaker 3: we think of p as a very water based activity,
Speaker 3: like you know, you need to drink more so that
Speaker 3: you can you can flush everything out correctly. And the
Speaker 3: birds are less reliant on how much water they've got
Speaker 3: in their system, and probably they're probably therefore need to
Speaker 3: fluctuate their body weight less and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but one, on one level, you could make an
Speaker 1: argument that birds don't urinate. And I was looking around
Speaker 1: and even in peer reviewed articles by scientists who are
Speaker 1: studying birds. You see it both ways. Some say birds
Speaker 1: absolutely do not pee because of the aforementioned caveats, while
Speaker 1: others freely use the term urine, because I mean, at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, we need to call it something.
Speaker 1: What is the stuff flowing down the legs of the vulture?
Speaker 1: They'll just call it urine? Why not?
Speaker 3: I recall this came up a bit in our episodes
Speaker 3: on eurohedrosis, which was the thing about birds pooping on
Speaker 3: their own legs in order to gain the benefits of
Speaker 3: evaporative cooling.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so yeah, you see it like also insects
Speaker 1: Excrete uric acid. But sometimes you'll just see it called urine.
Speaker 1: You know. Informally you have to call it something in
Speaker 1: these papers. However, on occasion you will see it referred
Speaker 1: to as urate instead of urine. So I mean there
Speaker 1: is some additional terminology out there. At any rate, agree
Speaker 1: to disagree on what urine is or isn't. But control,
Speaker 1: I think is the more fascinating aspect of all of this.
Speaker 1: If you have a urin ordinary bladder to store your
Speaker 1: waste liquids in, you can store quite a bit of it,
Speaker 1: and then you can release it to an extent at
Speaker 1: your leisure. It becomes rather unleisurely after a while, but
Speaker 1: you have a fair amount of control about when and
Speaker 1: where you're going to release said urine, and this seems
Speaker 1: to be essentially true of all bladder equipped animals. Animals
Speaker 1: without a bladder, however, it's interesting they can't store as much,
Speaker 1: but they apparently do tend to have some degree of
Speaker 1: control over timing by storing small amounts of it in
Speaker 1: the cloaca and so forth. Now, the degree to which
Speaker 1: we exercise control over our urine is quite fascinating when
Speaker 1: you get past how mundane and to a certain extent
Speaker 1: taboo it is. To break all this down. I was
Speaker 1: reading a twenty nineteen article titled Choosing to Urinate Circuits
Speaker 1: and Mechanisms Underlying Voluntary Urination by Mochopodhey and Stowers, And
Speaker 1: as the title suggests, it really is paper really gets
Speaker 1: into the underlying mechanisms of peeing. But I loved the
Speaker 1: way they initially present urination in general, and they lead
Speaker 1: with the following sentence, which I thought was splendid quote.
Speaker 1: Urination is one of the most commonly and routinely performed
Speaker 1: social behaviors. Yeah, isn't that that neat? But we often
Speaker 1: don't think about it like we a social behavior. You
Speaker 1: tend to think of your a nation as anything but
Speaker 1: social right You you leave everyone else's company. Generally to
Speaker 1: go do it, you want to be out of sight
Speaker 1: of everyone else, you know, even if you know you're
Speaker 1: on a hike or the movie theater, wherever you want
Speaker 1: to you generally want some privacy, even if it's sort
Speaker 1: of the artificial privacy of you know, like little walls
Speaker 1: at the urnal stalls and so forth.
Speaker 3: It's one of the most anti social things we do,
Speaker 3: I would think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, unless you're a small child, of course, and they
Speaker 1: do whatever, and that's something we tend to celebrate in
Speaker 1: art and humor as adults. There's you know, you can
Speaker 1: cultures all over like, there's nothing more amusing than a
Speaker 1: child just peeing whenever and wherever they want, and they
Speaker 1: get away with it.
Speaker 3: The bumper stickers are dedicated to that's true.
Speaker 1: But yeah, the point they make is that even in
Speaker 1: making that choice to go off and pee behind a
Speaker 1: tree or in a bush, or certainly to use the
Speaker 1: restroom as opposed to the corner of the movie theater,
Speaker 1: you are carefully fitting your urination into your social environment.
Speaker 1: The authors point out that humans are regularly consciously checking
Speaker 1: in on the fullness of their bladder and then calculating
Speaker 1: their own urination urgency and then figuring out the social
Speaker 1: appropriateness of relieving themselves. And I think that makes even
Speaker 1: more sense when you think about not only the physical
Speaker 1: act of urination, but excusing yourself to go urinate, the
Speaker 1: way that you're going to present it with language, what
Speaker 1: you were going to, how much detail you're going to
Speaker 1: go into, how much detail you're not going to go
Speaker 1: into about what you need to go to.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 3: I don't know if I've ever thought about it that way,
Speaker 3: but yes, there is a ton of social calculation and
Speaker 3: social negotiation in the timing and location and all that
Speaker 3: kind of thing about going to the bathroom.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Like there are a million ways to essentially
Speaker 1: say excuse me, I need to go pee, and you
Speaker 1: would use different versions of this potentially depending on your
Speaker 1: exact social environment. Now, this next bit that the authors
Speaker 1: point out this is kind of an overstatement of the obvious,
Speaker 1: but one of those I think overstatements backed up by
Speaker 1: some findings that I think drives home the point really well.
Speaker 1: They point out that for the majority of individuals living
Speaker 1: with spinal cord injuries that end up preventing voluntary control
Speaker 1: over urination, among other functions, it's that lack of urination
Speaker 1: control that is generally rated as the factor that impacts
Speaker 1: their life the most. You know, again, we don't think
Speaker 1: of it, think about our ability to control our urination
Speaker 1: until something gets in the way of our ability to
Speaker 1: control it, and then we realize just how socially important
Speaker 1: that control really is. And all this they note is
Speaker 1: on top of the primary animal concerns of the urination decision,
Speaker 1: which add the additional questions is it physically safe right
Speaker 1: now for me to relieve myself? Or can I relieve
Speaker 1: myself right now in a manner that's not going to
Speaker 1: foul my environment and or negatively impact my health? And
Speaker 1: then for some animals, there again there is that added
Speaker 1: domain of communication. What sort of information am I putting
Speaker 1: out there by urinating? Why? Here? Why now? And this
Speaker 1: factor too, gives us all the more reason for an
Speaker 1: animal to be able to hold on to a supply
Speaker 1: of urine, because if you're going to potentially need that
Speaker 1: to communicate, then you don't want to just get rid
Speaker 1: of all of it. You might need to have some
Speaker 1: of it with you because what if you need to
Speaker 1: speak and you have no voice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is really interesting because it raises ways in
Speaker 3: which urine is and is not like language for communication.
Speaker 3: One way that it is not like language is that
Speaker 3: with language, you have voluntary control over what you say
Speaker 3: with your urine. I think there's probably a lot less control,
Speaker 3: maybe no control for most species, over what you say
Speaker 3: with your urine. Instead, it's a question of when and
Speaker 3: how and where.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for the most part, there's a raw honesty to
Speaker 1: the statement made with urine. But we may come back
Speaker 1: to that a little later. Oh yeah, now this is
Speaker 1: a good teaser. Yeah, you may in fact be able
Speaker 1: to lie even with p but we'll explore that.
Speaker 4: As we go on.
Speaker 1: For the most part, though, yeah, humans don't engage in this.
Speaker 1: One major factor is that while humans can certainly smell urine,
Speaker 1: as we all know, again, we cannot process it and
Speaker 1: read it in the way that so many animals with
Speaker 1: heightened senses of smell can.
Speaker 3: This is something I was wondering about. Certain there's not
Speaker 3: a whole lot of conscious information conveyed or gleaned by
Speaker 3: the smell of urine. I would wonder to what extent
Speaker 3: there may be some subconscious information transmitted, But even then
Speaker 3: I would be skeptical of anything that claims too strong of.
Speaker 4: An effect based on that A lot of I don't know.
Speaker 3: I feel like a lot of those studies about sort
Speaker 3: of like the unconscious kind of smell based judgments made
Speaker 3: about people, some of that stuff was kind of overstated,
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And then you get into a lot of these
Speaker 1: at times heated disagreements over pheromones and humans, which I'll
Speaker 1: touch on here in a bit. But but yet not
Speaker 1: too imply that humans, you know, I mean, we do
Speaker 1: not have the same sense of smell. We don't do
Speaker 1: not live in the same sense universe as a dog
Speaker 1: or even a cat. But you know, we can still
Speaker 1: smell an impressive number of different sense I've read as
Speaker 1: high as like one trillion different since and certainly you
Speaker 1: know I can. I can say that I can tell
Speaker 1: the difference between the of cat urine and the odor
Speaker 1: of human urine. They're distinct, and I can point them out.
Speaker 1: But being able to smell one trillion sents that's not
Speaker 1: the same thing as being able to actually make sense
Speaker 1: of all the data. An imperfect analogy came to my
Speaker 1: mind as I was reading about this. So if you
Speaker 1: were to venture into a movie theater with quite poor
Speaker 1: eyesight and no sound. Based on your limited side alone,
Speaker 1: what could you make out about the movie? Could you
Speaker 1: determine its genre, it's a decade of release, anything at
Speaker 1: all about its stars, its director, its country of origin
Speaker 1: or plot, Like, there's a lot of infort. You might
Speaker 1: be able to make some very broad judgments about it
Speaker 1: based on what you could see. But what you couldn't
Speaker 1: see would be like all the really important details that
Speaker 1: make it not just you know, an array of colors
Speaker 1: that speak to a certain decade maybe, but would actually
Speaker 1: make it a story. Yeah, you know, it's a fool's there,
Speaker 1: and I think in the end to try and fully
Speaker 1: put ourselves in the mind so or the since universe
Speaker 1: of another organism. We've talked about this before. Much has
Speaker 1: been written about this, but I get the feeling that
Speaker 1: this is the sort of gulf between what happens when
Speaker 1: a human smells a splash of urine and a dog.
Speaker 1: Does you know it is? The dog is just going
Speaker 1: to since things with so much more clarity.
Speaker 3: And you could probably tell that just intuitively by watching
Speaker 3: the behavior of a dog by like how important it
Speaker 3: is to them, how much attention they pay to the
Speaker 3: urine of other dogs, and to marking with urine of
Speaker 3: their own that you can tell, even before the experiments
Speaker 3: are done, that something very significant is being exchanged here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, like this is this is not just a
Speaker 1: dog being dumb. This is a dog knowing that there
Speaker 1: is important information here that can be gleaned, and therefore
Speaker 1: it deserves another sniffer. Two. I have to I have
Speaker 1: to bring this back to where wolves for just a second.
Speaker 1: Here I was reading a nineteen ninety six Discworld novel
Speaker 1: titled Feet of Clay by the late great Terry Pratchett, who,
Speaker 1: if you're not with Terry Pratchett, you know, writes these
Speaker 1: wonderful wrote these wonderful novels set in the fantasy world
Speaker 1: of Discworld, full of Monty python esque humor, lots of
Speaker 1: silly stuff. But he also had a real gift for
Speaker 1: insightful commentary as well. And h and yeah, so you know,
Speaker 1: be just mad cap goofy one second. But then it
Speaker 1: gets really interesting. And in particular, there's a there's a
Speaker 1: character in this, a member of the Night's Watch whose
Speaker 1: whose name is ongo Of von Uberwald, and she is
Speaker 1: a were wolf, and he he describes her ability to
Speaker 1: smell several times in the book, she's investigating things and
Speaker 1: leaning on her werewolf senses to smell the environment, and
Speaker 1: and pointing out that she can smell a room and
Speaker 1: she can know like who or what has been present
Speaker 1: in that room for perhaps as long as a month prior,
Speaker 1: which I think I thought was an interesting way of
Speaker 1: looking at it, Like it's it's it's challenging to describe
Speaker 1: this sort of thing, something that's really foreign to our smell, dull,
Speaker 1: visually focused existence. But the closest way you might be
Speaker 1: able to describe something like this is that this werewolf
Speaker 1: character she can see through time with her sense of smell.
Speaker 1: She can look back through time with smell, And I
Speaker 1: think that's maybe scratching at a way that we might
Speaker 1: understand what a dog is doing or a various other
Speaker 1: animals that have heightened senses of smells when they are
Speaker 1: picking up on odors like this.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now again, you do see arguments about pheromones, and I mean,
Speaker 1: pheromones are of course real, but to what degree or
Speaker 1: of it all are humans able to pick up on pheromones.
Speaker 1: I was reading a twenty fourteen article for Scientific American
Speaker 1: by Daisy Juhus, and the author points out that there's
Speaker 1: quote no evidence of a consistent and strong behavioral response
Speaker 1: to any human produced chemical cue, so it's possible. She
Speaker 1: points out that we might have once had capabilities along
Speaker 1: these lines, but what we're left with now are just
Speaker 1: it's far blunt or instrumentation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that lines up with what I've read. Generally, you
Speaker 3: couldn't rule out that humans are to some small degree
Speaker 3: influenced subconsciously by the smells of each other. But it
Speaker 3: doesn't seem it doesn't seem like we're at that sort
Speaker 3: of animal pheromone level like some people thought maybe, I
Speaker 3: don't know, a few decades ago, there was kind of
Speaker 3: a buzz about this. I think that, like, are we
Speaker 3: actually secretly being controlled? But you know, are we subject
Speaker 3: to pheromone mind control? I think the answer is no.
Speaker 3: To whatever extent such influences there, they seem to be
Speaker 3: rather mild.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean not to say that that smell data
Speaker 1: is not in the mix when we're evaluating other people.
Speaker 1: I mean, some people have nice smells about them and
Speaker 1: we pick up on that, or they have bad smells
Speaker 1: about them that we don't like and we pick up
Speaker 1: on that as well. You know, And in either case,
Speaker 1: either organic smells or smells that have been applied through perfumes
Speaker 1: and deodorance and whatnot. But yeah, the idea that there
Speaker 1: there's actually a lot of pheromonal communication going on. Probably
Speaker 1: not even in confusing this matter too. You have various
Speaker 1: trends that pick up on this, you know, like dating
Speaker 1: trends we've seen in the past where it's like, do
Speaker 1: some what is it flash dating based on smell. I
Speaker 1: don't know if that's still a fad, but for a
Speaker 1: little while I remember that being.
Speaker 4: In the news. I'm not going to comment on that.
Speaker 1: Now here's one more interesting question. Humans therefore can't really
Speaker 1: read urine, but might we be able to communicate with
Speaker 1: our urine with another species that can read urine?
Speaker 3: Mm, so, like we could we talk urine even if
Speaker 3: we can't really understand urine?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and I mean largely no, but sort of
Speaker 1: yes too, according to some in a very one directional way.
Speaker 1: Never Wolf author and environmentalist Farley Mowatt wrote about this
Speaker 1: in his book Never Cry Wolf, talking about marking his
Speaker 1: territory in the wilderness while studying wolves, and claimed that
Speaker 1: they honored his marked territory and marked like their side
Speaker 1: of the Mark Stones film fans might remember watching Charles
Speaker 1: Martin Smith do this the nineteen eighty three film adaptation.
Speaker 1: Dogs furthermore, can be trained to pick up on specific
Speaker 1: notes in human urine that can be helpful in the
Speaker 1: detection of illnesses. So you know, that's kind of a
Speaker 1: one way urine communication.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I can see that, and I'm.
Speaker 1: Not sure it may come back to this later, but
Speaker 1: you could also eventually add the medical and technological layer
Speaker 1: to all of this and say that while through our
Speaker 1: medicine and through our technology, humans absolutely can read urine,
Speaker 1: and you know, to a certain extent, you could imagine
Speaker 1: some scenario where we could speak with our urine as well,
Speaker 1: if we were using our technology on like both ends
Speaker 1: of the conversation. I'm not sure what that would look
Speaker 1: like of why that would be, but maybe we'll get
Speaker 1: into that later.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, I think we need to wrap up part
Speaker 3: one of this series there, but we're going to be
Speaker 3: back in at least one more party, maybe multiple parts,
Speaker 3: with more fascinating examples of urine based communication. What can
Speaker 3: the p say and what can we hear?
Speaker 1: That's right, so tune in for that. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: we will just remind you that Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 1: Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core
Speaker 1: episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we have a
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