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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My

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Speaker 2: name is Robert.

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Speaker 3: Lenn and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with

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Speaker 3: Part three in our series on urine based communication in

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Speaker 3: the animal Kingdom. Humans, of course, have the gift of language,

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Speaker 3: which is a wonderful multimodal information sharing tool of infinite versatility,

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Speaker 3: and the fact that we possess the capacity for complex

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Speaker 3: language is maybe the most unique and amazing thing about

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Speaker 3: us as a species. But one mode of communication that

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Speaker 3: we don't really use but which is quite popular throughout

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Speaker 3: the animal kingdom is communication through urine. So in the

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Speaker 3: last couple of episodes we discussed a whole bunch of examples.

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Speaker 3: We started off in part one talking about male Amazon

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Speaker 3: river dolphins, which have been observed doing this amazing thing

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Speaker 3: where they pee on each other's faces using aerial streams

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Speaker 3: that project over the top of the water. Still an

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Speaker 3: open question as to why they do this, but the

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Speaker 3: leading explanation seems to be that it's some kind of

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Speaker 3: information sharing about fitness and competitive ability. We also talked

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Speaker 3: about why animals with urinary bladders usually have voluntary control

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Speaker 3: over urination as opposed to it just kind of leaking

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Speaker 3: out whenever, wherever, And we also got into a bit

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Speaker 3: about urination as a socially negotiated activity in human culture.

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Speaker 3: In the last episode, we talked about the vast, mysterious

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Speaker 3: world of scent marking in dogs, including all the different

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Speaker 3: kinds of information that we know dogs do share with

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Speaker 3: each other through urine, but also about how much there

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Speaker 3: is to this olfactory literary scene that we still don't understand.

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Speaker 3: One interesting question that came up in the context of

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Speaker 3: dogs was whether dogs can actually attempt to lie or

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Speaker 3: at least exaggerate with their urine Marx one study finding

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Speaker 3: evidence that smaller dogs may try to deceive other dogs

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Speaker 3: about their size by way of increasingly obtuse leg angles

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Speaker 3: when marking an elevated object. Then we also talked about

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Speaker 3: the fascinating example of lobster urine. The simplified version is

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Speaker 3: that lobsters pee out of their faces into other lobsters faces,

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Speaker 3: and these urine exchanges help lobsters navigate highly variable scenarios,

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Speaker 3: including courtship and mating, as well as competition and intimidation.

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Speaker 3: And we're back today to talk about more.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, returning first, I believe, to the waters and

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Speaker 2: discussing something we teased out a little bit in our

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Speaker 2: discussion of lobster.

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Speaker 3: That's right, so yes. In the previous episode we talked

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Speaker 3: about urine based communication in crustaceans. I wanted to return

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Speaker 3: to the aquatic domain to mention p mail in fish.

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Speaker 3: So here I wanted to get into a couple of

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Speaker 3: things from a paper called Aggressive Communication in Aquatic Environments.

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Speaker 3: This was published in the journal Functional Ecology in twenty twenty.

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Speaker 3: The author is Johim Frohman, and Frohman is a behavioral

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Speaker 3: ecologist at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. I got interested

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Speaker 3: in this guy's work because I saw him quoted in

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Speaker 3: an article in Scientific American, which was covering the Amazon

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Speaker 3: River dolphins, talking about how other aquatic species can use

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Speaker 3: urine for communication. One example cited in that article had

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Speaker 3: to do with mating among sticklebackfish. Apparently, female sticklebackfish can

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Speaker 3: get information about male stickleback fish from their urine, but

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Speaker 3: in this case not just the kind of health, dominance

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Speaker 3: and fitness information we've been mostly talking about so far. Instead,

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Speaker 3: the stickleback female is looking for information about the male's

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Speaker 3: immune system to see if the male's immune system and

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Speaker 3: tissue is compatible with her own. So anyway, I looked

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Speaker 3: up this paper in functional ecology. It is focused primarily

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Speaker 3: on aggressive communication, a communication used to negotiate competition and

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Speaker 3: fighting among rivals that live in the water. Now, obviously,

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Speaker 3: using urine for information sharing works a little bit differently

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Speaker 3: in aquatic environments than it does on land. Now, why

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Speaker 3: would that be? Well, for one thing in the water

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Speaker 3: froman points out that you cannot place long lasting territorial

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Speaker 3: scent marks. So a dog will tag its physical environment

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Speaker 3: with territorial marks it peas on the world, and in

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Speaker 3: doing so, it fills the world with information about itself.

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Speaker 3: And also it smells the marks left by others in

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Speaker 3: the same places. So for the dog, you can consider

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Speaker 3: space itself kind of marked up with socially relevant metadata.

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Speaker 3: It is a urine based social augmented reality.

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Speaker 2: That's a good way of putting it. Yeah, with all

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Speaker 2: of our augmented reality VR innovations that we're working on

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Speaker 2: Google Class and all of that, we're essentially trying to

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Speaker 2: create a world of dog pe and the reading of

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Speaker 2: dog pe for the human experience.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, it would be like if we could walk through

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Speaker 3: space and just find objects throughout the physical environment tagged

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Speaker 3: with the profiles of people who have touched them more

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Speaker 3: peen on them, I guess.

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Speaker 1: So.

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Speaker 3: Lots of other land based mammals that we've talked about

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Speaker 3: do this. You know, last time we talked about the

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Speaker 3: dwarf mongooses who leave the antogenital scent marks by doing handstands.

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Speaker 3: But you can't really do this kind of thing in

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Speaker 3: the water because you're in the water. Froman mentions a

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Speaker 3: couple of reasons for this. First of all, chemical cues

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Speaker 3: tend to be soluble in water, so the water will

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Speaker 3: actually just wash them away, diffuse them, and get rid

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Speaker 3: of any local marks that you leave pretty quickly. Beyond that,

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Speaker 3: there is a different microbial environment in the water. Fromen writes,

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Speaker 3: quote the ubiquitous bacteria in aquatic environments might rapidly degrade

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Speaker 3: any scent mark. So for aquatic species, it's just a

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Speaker 3: lot harder to associate a chemical mark with a physical

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Speaker 3: location across time. Chemical cues in the water tend to

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Speaker 3: be more temporary, used for what Fromann calls short term interactions,

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Speaker 3: and they will also more often be associated spatially with

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Speaker 3: your own physical body from which they emerge, rather than

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Speaker 3: a fixed, separate place in the environment. So I get

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Speaker 3: the feeling that in the water there's going to be

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Speaker 3: less of what you were talking about rob with this

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Speaker 3: sort of the werewolf character that can go into a

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Speaker 3: room and see the past in the room. Because of

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Speaker 3: all these scents associated with physical locations. In the water,

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Speaker 3: everything just kind of gets washed around. So I wonder

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Speaker 3: if in the water there may be a more Oh,

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Speaker 3: I don't know. Maybe you can get little tiny whiffs

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Speaker 3: of things that may have once been nearby, but they're

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Speaker 3: going to be a lot less associated with physical places.

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Speaker 2: That's a good point.

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Speaker 3: So anyway, what are these short term interactions. They include

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Speaker 3: things like mate choice what Froeman calls social decisions, detecting

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Speaker 3: predatory threats, and sharing information about those threats with other conspecifics.

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Speaker 3: The best research on chemical communication underwater has been focused

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Speaker 3: on crustaceans, hence all the lobster research we talked about

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Speaker 3: last time. There's a bunch of similar work on crayfish

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Speaker 3: as well, and Frohman discusses a lot of the same

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Speaker 3: stuff we got into. For example, the finding that the

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Speaker 3: presence of aggressor urine during competition between lobsters and crayfish

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Speaker 3: can actually reduce fighting. Essentially, the information in the urine

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Speaker 3: better allows at least one of these crustaceans to figure

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Speaker 3: out that the fight is not in their interest. So,

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Speaker 3: in a way, you could think of actual physical fighting

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Speaker 3: in nature often being the result of confusion or ambiguity.

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Speaker 3: You know, it happens when the competitors don't have enough

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Speaker 3: information to figure out in advance who would probably win.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, this is something that that you can you can

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Speaker 2: certainly relate to human gambling scenarios. In some cases, you

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Speaker 2: could be talking about actual gambling for money or various

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Speaker 2: games and little card games and apps in which there

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Speaker 2: is like the gambling of some sort of unit but

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Speaker 2: not actual that doesn't have an actual monetary value or

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Speaker 2: at least an avert monetary value. There is often often

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Speaker 2: comes down to a question of should I fold or not,

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Speaker 2: or should I you know, up the ante, should I

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Speaker 2: keep playing and trying to evaluate do I have a

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Speaker 2: shot at winning? And you know, that's very much the

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Speaker 2: same math that's going on for these various organisms using

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Speaker 2: the data that is available to them, which might be

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Speaker 2: available to them in the form of urine.

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Speaker 3: That's a good analogy. Yeah, so the sharing of the

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Speaker 3: urine could essentially be like the poker players just showing

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Speaker 3: each other their cards. You're like not keeping them hidden anymore,

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Speaker 3: so one player immediately knows I'm just going to fold.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, Or there's always going to be a certain amount

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Speaker 2: of data on the table, right yea, and that that

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Speaker 2: is often going to be the main data you're going

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Speaker 2: to go on in a card game. Now there's the

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Speaker 2: added wrinkle, of course in a card game, and that

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Speaker 2: your opponent may want you to venture into combat that

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Speaker 2: you couldn't win in order to increase the spoils of

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Speaker 2: the game. Generally, it's not quite what you're looking at

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Speaker 2: when you're dealing with mate competition in the wild.

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Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that'd be interesting to see if there are

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Speaker 3: examples of that in nature, where like the opponent would

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Speaker 3: want to keep, you know, getting you to up the

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Speaker 3: ante and bluff you along. But yeah, usually I think

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Speaker 3: even the stronger party would prefer to avoid a fight.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: Anyway, so froman here mentions a variable called resource holding

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Speaker 3: potential RH. You might see this referred to in some

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Speaker 3: papers like this. Basically it's a variable that means an

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Speaker 3: individual animal's ability to win a fight. So urine helps

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Speaker 3: communicate your RHP, making the actual fight unnecessary. So after

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Speaker 3: talking about urine and RHP in crustaceans, Fromann goes on

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Speaker 3: to talk about fish, saying similar uses of chemical signals

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Speaker 3: have been observed in several African cichlid species and in

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Speaker 3: some tilapia to establish RHP dominance without needing a fight.

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Speaker 3: But here we get to something interesting that came up

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Speaker 3: in the last episode. In part two, we talked about

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Speaker 3: some good reasons for thinking that dogs use urine based

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Speaker 3: signals to encode not only the kind of fixed feeling

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Speaker 3: information about individual identity, health and fitness, sex, and mating status,

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Speaker 3: but much more flat leading momentary things like psychological information.

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Speaker 3: Remember the example we talked about last time was that

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Speaker 3: domestic dogs have been found to detect biomarkers of stress

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Speaker 3: in human urine, and they seem to use that information

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Speaker 3: they use it in cognition and learning. Still to be

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Speaker 3: determined to what extent, if any, dogs use that information

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Speaker 3: from scent markings urine markings about each other, but it

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Speaker 3: seems quite plausible that they do that they're saying, oh,

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Speaker 3: not just this is Jeff the dog down the street,

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Speaker 3: and not just health status, does it have parasites and

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Speaker 3: all that, but also like Jeff is stressed out or

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Speaker 3: Jeff is happy, and that might affect how the dog

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Speaker 3: that smells the pee behaves. We don't know for sure,

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Speaker 3: but it seems plausible that it does so to some extent.

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Speaker 3: This kind of I would say, makes sense to us

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Speaker 3: with dogs. It's fascinating, but it's not crazy, because we

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Speaker 3: already think of dogs as emotional animals with emotional inner lives.

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Speaker 3: Their feelings and motivation states are familiar and meaningful to us.

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Speaker 3: But it seems there are some likely equivalents to this

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Speaker 3: pea based emotion or at least motivation state sharing, even

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Speaker 3: among the colder and less snugly inhabitants of the water.

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Speaker 3: I think you could say that lobsters, as we talked

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Speaker 3: about last time, and even fish, to some extent, pee

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Speaker 3: their feelings. Frohman mentions that quote in juvenile nile telapia

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Speaker 3: or Oreochromis nylocticus, the exchange of chemical cues informs about

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Speaker 3: the sender's motivation and about individual identity, and then also

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Speaker 3: speaking about neolam prologus pulture froman rites quote. In this species,

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Speaker 3: members of both sexes change their urination patterns during agonistic

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Speaker 3: encounters agonistic meaning aggressive encounters. Competition quote blocking olfactory contact

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Speaker 3: between contestants led to an increase in fight intensity and

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Speaker 3: to a higher rate of overt aggressive attacks, in line

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Speaker 3: with what we've talked about before, but going on quote,

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Speaker 3: As larger individuals excreted, larger amounts of urine, chemical cues

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Speaker 3: might be a reliable proxy of the opponent's body size,

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Speaker 3: which might be beneficial, especially under turbid conditions. Furthermore, an

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Speaker 3: aggression mediated increase in urination frequency was accompanied by an

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Speaker 3: increased amount of conjugated eleven ketotestosterone in the water. Thus,

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Speaker 3: urine might not only transfer information about the contestants resource

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Speaker 3: holding potential, but also about the opponent's motivational state. So again,

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Speaker 3: something about what this the urine might communicate, something about

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Speaker 3: what is going on essentially in the brain, in the

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Speaker 3: nervous system of the other fish, what they want, what

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Speaker 3: they intend to do, which I guess it's debatable whether

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Speaker 3: you would call that motivational state an emotion, but I

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Speaker 3: think the case could be made emotions and motivational states

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Speaker 3: have significant overlap, at least in humans and in other animals.

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Speaker 2: We can think of yeah, yeah, I mean from the

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Speaker 2: human standpoint, if there is a standoff between two human beings,

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Speaker 2: the broadcasting of emotional state, be it an honest broadcast

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Speaker 2: or an attempted deception, is going to be an important

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Speaker 2: part of that standoff. You know, how mean are they looking,

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Speaker 2: how cool are they looking, and so forth.

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Speaker 3: And of course this squares with what you were talking

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Speaker 3: about last time, rob with the lobster urine in competition

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Speaker 3: between aggressive lobsters. The urine shares state information about, for example,

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Speaker 3: prior victory or defeat in these agonistic encounters. Sounds a

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Speaker 3: lot like again people, people might quibble with the use

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Speaker 3: of the word emotion, but that feels something like emotion

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Speaker 3: to me, like feeling victorious or feeling defeated.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, Like I believe one of the papers was I

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Speaker 2: was talking about there being a lot of serotonin in

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Speaker 2: the urine of a victorious lobster. You know, it's is

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Speaker 2: that an emotional stay Maybe not, but it's saying something

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Speaker 2: about like where that that creature's physiology is following a

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Speaker 2: specific victory.

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Speaker 3: So I don't know. When we started doing this series

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Speaker 3: about urine based communication, I don't think I realized we

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Speaker 3: would come up with so many examples where it looked

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Speaker 3: like the urine was not only sharing just the more

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Speaker 3: relatively fig I mean, I guess nothing biological is really fixed,

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Speaker 3: but the more stable sort of biological health information, not

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Speaker 3: just that, but sharing something like psychological information, sharing something

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Speaker 3: the urine says something about what's going on in your

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Speaker 3: nervous system and in your brain, which we may call

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Speaker 3: emotions or we may call intentions or motivations. That's being

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Speaker 3: communicated through urine as well. And to me, that makes

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Speaker 3: it a lot more like what we think of with language.

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Speaker 3: I mean, we've made these distinctions before about the differences

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Speaker 3: between what you can say with urine versus what you

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Speaker 3: can say with language. Obviously, language is going to be

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Speaker 3: much much more versatile because you can intentionally, voluntarily craft

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Speaker 3: an infinite number of different kinds of messages, truthful or deceptive,

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Speaker 3: and urine may not have that level of versatility, but

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Speaker 3: it can communicate not just these sort of stable facts

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Speaker 3: about the body, but can communicate this fleeting information about

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Speaker 3: the mind. And if you want to get touchy feely

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Speaker 3: the soul. I guess that just causes me to think

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Speaker 3: about P based communication as something with more potential for

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Speaker 3: kind of meaning and complexity. You know that it carries

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Speaker 3: potentially emotional information that it lends itself more to the

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Speaker 3: idea that there could be P based literature.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think yeah. By and large, all this

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Speaker 2: information we're looking at does drive home the fact that

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Speaker 2: humans just don't don't speak urine. For the most part,

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Speaker 2: we have a very blunt understanding of what urine is

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Speaker 2: and what it can convey, and it's just a much

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Speaker 2: richer experience for other animals, to the point that it's

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Speaker 2: not really urine for them anymore, not in the human sense,

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Speaker 2: like our language for urine is kind of inadequate to

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Speaker 2: truly describe what it is for various other species. Now,

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Speaker 2: I want to bring things back to the mammal world here,

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Speaker 2: to the surface world, in particular, to talk about the

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Speaker 2: fleming response. This may have been on some of your

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Speaker 2: mind as we were talking about this topic in earlier episodes,

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Speaker 2: because in evaluating the urine communication of another it may

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Speaker 2: prove necessary to assume the fleming response, as it was

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Speaker 2: dubbed by German zoologist Carl Max Schneider in the nineteen thirties,

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Speaker 2: but the expression itself had been known to naturalists since

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Speaker 2: at least the eighteenth century. The term flemen apparently comes

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Speaker 2: from upper saxon German, where it means to curl the

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Speaker 2: upper lip and or to look spiteful. It's not just

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Speaker 2: for smelling urine, but that's certainly one of the odorous

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Speaker 2: bouquets that it picks up on.

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Speaker 3: So the word am I understanding in the human context

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Speaker 3: originally refers to an expression like a sneer, the curled lip.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, a sneer that you know, honestly, I don't know

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Speaker 2: that you see. I don't know. I feel like you

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Speaker 2: don't see people make this face a lot, and we'll

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Speaker 2: come back to one of the reasons why. But in general,

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Speaker 2: like how often do you see someone do like a

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Speaker 2: spiteful sneer in which they expose their upper teeth? Like

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Speaker 2: the main example I was finding. I found a couple

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Speaker 2: of articles that had a picture of Harrison Ford doing

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Speaker 2: the face, you know, maybe accidentally in the midst of

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Speaker 2: talking or something. But for the most part, the main

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Speaker 2: thing I was reminded of is the snarl that Bella

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Speaker 2: Lagosi gives in some of the in some one particular scene,

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Speaker 2: but also some production stills for the nineteen thirties Dracula.

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Speaker 3: Oh okay, you attached a picture in the outline, and

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Speaker 3: I can see that he he almost looks not quite

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Speaker 3: human here. It looks a bit like a like a

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Speaker 3: big cat.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's key because we do see

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Speaker 2: this in cats. We see it in big cats, and

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Speaker 2: we see it in house cats, and in the world

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Speaker 2: of house cats it is sometimes informally referred to as

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Speaker 2: the stinky kitty face.

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Speaker 3: I didn't know about this.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, it's one of these things where you know, as

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Speaker 2: a cat owner, it's gonna obviously things are going to

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Speaker 2: vary depending on the exact nature and personality of your cat,

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Speaker 2: but it's something you'll pick up on them doing from

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Speaker 2: time to time. They might be checking out something that

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Speaker 2: you would associate with a smell, like, I don't know,

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Speaker 2: a spot on the couch or a pair of shoes,

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Speaker 2: that sort of thing. It might also just be a

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Speaker 2: little less clear what they are responding to, but generally

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Speaker 2: the idea is that they are assuming this kind of

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Speaker 2: a sneer that also looks a little bit goofy. And

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Speaker 2: what they are doing is they are heightening their exposure

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Speaker 2: to the odor so is to better analyze it. Interesting, So,

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Speaker 2: in general, across various animals, you're going to see this

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Speaker 2: generally entailing a curling back of the upper lip, exposure

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Speaker 2: of the top teeth, and breathing. And then they're going

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Speaker 2: to breathe in slowly through the mouth alone. And this

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Speaker 2: is all about allowing better access of smells and pheromones

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Speaker 2: to the specialized vomer nasal organ, the vino or the

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Speaker 2: Jacobsen's or this is a chemoreception organ in the roof

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Speaker 2: of the mouth. This occurs in ungulates as well horses

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Speaker 2: and girafts, which both smell and in the latter example

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Speaker 2: of the diraffe, they also taste the urine of mares

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Speaker 2: that are in estrus.

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Speaker 3: Huh okay, well wait a minute. That makes me wonder

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Speaker 3: if all these other mammals have a vomor nasal organ.

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Speaker 3: Do we have one? Can we can we smell with

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Speaker 3: the roof of our mouth like this?

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Speaker 2: Humans do not, so far as anyone can apparently tell,

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Speaker 2: have one of these, at least not a functional one

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Speaker 2: as adults. According to twenty fourteen's Encyclopedia of the Neurological Sciences,

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Speaker 2: second edition by Moon. At all vomor nasal organs are

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Speaker 2: prominent in the fetus and show up vestigially in adults.

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Speaker 2: Though there has apparently been a lot of back and

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Speaker 2: forth debate over this, it seems like the majority of view, though,

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Speaker 2: is that while some primates have functional vomit nasal organs,

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Speaker 2: main like New World monkeys, chimps, and humans do not.

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Speaker 2: Interesting I'd also point out something that I saw reference

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Speaker 2: in an article is that the obviousness of the fleming

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Speaker 2: response to humans in another organism, like how pronounced the

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Speaker 2: fleming response is, doesn't necessarily correlate to how strong their

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Speaker 2: ability to sense things happens to be, which I guess

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Speaker 2: is kind of a no brainer when you're driving home

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Speaker 2: like that. But you know, some fleming responses are really wild,

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Speaker 2: like included a photo here of a horse's fleming response

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Speaker 2: where they just look like mad demons, whereas certainly a

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Speaker 2: housecat's fleming response just looks a little bit funny, you know,

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Speaker 2: But our interpretation of it doesn't actually necessarily give us

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Speaker 2: any clues into how strong their ability to sense things

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Speaker 2: happens to be. But we again. We certainly see it

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Speaker 2: again in ungulates and dogs and cats and other mammals.

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Speaker 2: I've even seen articles looking at the fleming response in

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Speaker 2: things like sea otters and elephants. So it's it's all

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Speaker 2: over the place.

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Speaker 3: That's interesting. I'm going to be on the lookout for

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Speaker 3: it now.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, if you spend any time with cats, you will

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Speaker 2: see the stinky kitty face from time to time. And yeah,

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Speaker 2: it's just a sign that there's some sort of smell

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Speaker 2: going on. Don't take it personally. It doesn't mean it's

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Speaker 2: you or something in your environment. They might just but

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Speaker 2: something has occurred or they've noticed something that requires just

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Speaker 2: a little more in depth analysis.

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Speaker 3: Well, I would like to transition to something else, but

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Speaker 3: we're gonna stick with mammals at least for the moment.

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Speaker 3: So I want to mention an interesting paper I came

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Speaker 3: across about social urination in mammals, which may or may

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Speaker 3: not turn out to be communicative in nature. This paper

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Speaker 3: was by Ana Onishi, James Brooks, Sota Inoe, and Shinya Yamamoto,

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Speaker 3: published in Current Biology in twenty twenty five this year,

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Speaker 3: and it's called socially contagious urination in Panzees, So I

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Speaker 3: hope that title's got your interests peaked. The authors here

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Speaker 3: are affiliated with a few different institutions in Japan, such

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Speaker 3: as Kyoto University. I was also reading an article about

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Speaker 3: this paper in Scientific American that I wanted to flag.

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Speaker 3: This was by Megan Bartel's from January twenty twenty five,

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Speaker 3: so apparently the lead author on this paper, ana Onishi,

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Speaker 3: was inspired in part by the fact that humans often

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Speaker 3: seem to treat urination as a social behavior. This kind

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Speaker 3: of came up in our first episode of the series.

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Speaker 3: Despite the fact that we often think of urination as

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Speaker 3: a solitary activity, an activity where we seek at least

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Speaker 3: a visual isolation for the sake of modesty, in reality,

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Speaker 3: people often do treat urination or trips to the bathroom

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Speaker 3: as social occasions. So think about it like this. You

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Speaker 3: are out somewhere and a restaurant or a concert look event,

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Speaker 3: and somebody from the group you're with says they're going

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Speaker 3: to go to the bathroom, and then somebody else says, oh,

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Speaker 3: wait up, I'll go with you, and then somebody else

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Speaker 3: says me too. Hey, it is actually a socially organized

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Speaker 3: social trip to the bathroom. People are urinating as a group.

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Speaker 2: You know, I hadn't thought about this as much until

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Speaker 2: you mentioned it. But you could also factor our social

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Speaker 2: technology into this equation and say, well, what even if

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Speaker 2: you go to the bathroom by yourself during one of

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Speaker 2: these situations, there's a very strong possibility you are going

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Speaker 2: to check your phone and in doing so, you are

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Speaker 2: going to engage in some alternate online socialization whilst going

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Speaker 2: to the bathroom. I don't know to what extent we

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Speaker 2: should factor that into all of this, but maybe you

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Speaker 2: could make a case for even solitary urination is social

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Speaker 2: given the right technology.

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Speaker 3: Socially coordinated, synchronized trips to urinate are actually very common,

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Speaker 3: and this is not just part of American culture where

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Speaker 3: where I'm familiar with it. The author of this scientific

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Speaker 3: American article actually mentions there is a word in Japanese.

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Speaker 3: It is suri sean t s u r E s

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Speaker 3: h o n, which refers to the phenomenon where people

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Speaker 3: get up and go to the bathroom as a group.

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Speaker 2: That would be interesting to get into. It makes me

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Speaker 2: think of the various yo kai traditions that involve the

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Speaker 2: potential threats, or at least that you know the very

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Speaker 2: scary things that it can occur when you go to

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Speaker 2: a dark bathroom at night by yourself. Yeah. I can't

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Speaker 2: help but wonder to what extent these two things might

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Speaker 2: be connected culturally.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, the bathroom stall ghosts. And there are other examples

434
00:26:41,960 --> 00:26:47,640
Speaker 3: of biological activities that seem to be socially contagious. One

435
00:26:47,680 --> 00:26:51,399
Speaker 3: example is yawning. I think we've all experienced this. Somebody

436
00:26:51,440 --> 00:26:54,200
Speaker 3: else yawns, you see them yawn and then you yawn yourself,

437
00:26:54,480 --> 00:26:58,600
Speaker 3: or maybe even inter species contagious yawning. You yawn and

438
00:26:58,640 --> 00:27:02,840
Speaker 3: then your dog yawns, vice versa. A very interesting question

439
00:27:02,960 --> 00:27:06,560
Speaker 3: about why seeing somebody else yawn makes you more likely

440
00:27:06,680 --> 00:27:08,520
Speaker 3: to yaw. Maybe we could come back to that in

441
00:27:08,600 --> 00:27:10,840
Speaker 3: the future if we haven't done a whole episode on

442
00:27:10,960 --> 00:27:14,160
Speaker 3: that before. Have we actually don't remember.

443
00:27:14,160 --> 00:27:17,119
Speaker 2: I don't think we have. Yawning. Yeah, that would be

444
00:27:17,160 --> 00:27:19,960
Speaker 2: a good one, you know, if only to generate the

445
00:27:20,040 --> 00:27:22,600
Speaker 2: responses that I can't believe they did an episode on yawning.

446
00:27:23,520 --> 00:27:26,280
Speaker 2: So boring. No, it's probably pretty exciting.

447
00:27:26,760 --> 00:27:30,480
Speaker 3: Also, scratching, Hey, that's exciting. What's more exciting than the scratching.

448
00:27:31,160 --> 00:27:34,480
Speaker 3: Scratching is contagious as well. Socially contagious scratching. You see

449
00:27:34,520 --> 00:27:36,400
Speaker 3: somebody scratch, you're more likely to scratch.

450
00:27:36,640 --> 00:27:38,639
Speaker 2: Yeah, scratching could be Yeah, it could easily be its

451
00:27:38,680 --> 00:27:41,720
Speaker 2: own episode as well. That one gets pretty intense anyway.

452
00:27:42,200 --> 00:27:46,840
Speaker 3: So, while observing chimpanzees as a doctoral researcher at the

453
00:27:47,080 --> 00:27:51,119
Speaker 3: Kyoto University Wildlife Research Center, the lead author of this

454
00:27:51,200 --> 00:27:56,960
Speaker 3: paper Onishi thought she observed a similar pattern of socially

455
00:27:57,119 --> 00:28:02,360
Speaker 3: contagious urination among the chimpanzees, so she staged a quantitative

456
00:28:02,400 --> 00:28:06,119
Speaker 3: experiment to measure whether this was really the case. The

457
00:28:06,160 --> 00:28:09,400
Speaker 3: way it worked is researchers studied a group of twenty

458
00:28:09,520 --> 00:28:13,399
Speaker 3: chimpanzees living in captivity at a place called Kumamoto Sanctuary

459
00:28:13,520 --> 00:28:18,280
Speaker 3: in Japan, and they filmed them and reviewed more than

460
00:28:18,400 --> 00:28:22,520
Speaker 3: six hundred hours of footage to meticulously track exactly when

461
00:28:22,720 --> 00:28:26,119
Speaker 3: each ape urinated, where it was at the time, and

462
00:28:26,200 --> 00:28:30,879
Speaker 3: who was nearby. Then they created a computer simulation of

463
00:28:31,160 --> 00:28:35,840
Speaker 3: randomized chimpanzee urination to compare the actual results to and

464
00:28:35,960 --> 00:28:40,640
Speaker 3: the analysis revealed that chimpanzees were not just peeing randomly,

465
00:28:40,760 --> 00:28:45,800
Speaker 3: there actually was social correlation. On average, an ape was

466
00:28:46,080 --> 00:28:49,560
Speaker 3: significantly more likely to pee if another ape had just

467
00:28:49,760 --> 00:28:53,120
Speaker 3: peed within the past sixty seconds, and especially if that

468
00:28:53,320 --> 00:28:57,720
Speaker 3: ape was very close by within ten feet so up ip.

469
00:28:58,520 --> 00:29:03,920
Speaker 3: Another interesting factor b yond time and proximity was social rank.

470
00:29:05,320 --> 00:29:09,400
Speaker 3: The researchers looked into whether the identity and social rank

471
00:29:09,480 --> 00:29:13,800
Speaker 3: of each urinate or mattered in how much how much

472
00:29:13,880 --> 00:29:18,320
Speaker 3: influence there was from one eight peeing to another eight peeing,

473
00:29:18,920 --> 00:29:23,080
Speaker 3: and the identities did matter. So they initially looked to

474
00:29:23,120 --> 00:29:26,880
Speaker 3: see whether the ape equivalent of social friendship was an influence,

475
00:29:26,920 --> 00:29:29,760
Speaker 3: and it seems the answer there was no, but social

476
00:29:30,280 --> 00:29:35,640
Speaker 3: rank was an influence. As quoted in Scientific American, Onehi

477
00:29:35,760 --> 00:29:39,920
Speaker 3: said quote, I initially expected that if social influences existed,

478
00:29:39,960 --> 00:29:43,560
Speaker 3: they might resemble those seen in yawning, such as stronger

479
00:29:43,720 --> 00:29:48,320
Speaker 3: contagion between socially close pairs. That in itself is an

480
00:29:48,360 --> 00:29:52,400
Speaker 3: interesting thing about yawning, that, like social social closeness, makes

481
00:29:52,440 --> 00:29:55,760
Speaker 3: the yawn more contagious. But that is not what they found,

482
00:29:56,120 --> 00:29:59,840
Speaker 3: continuing the quote from Onehi. Instead, we observed a c

483
00:30:00,120 --> 00:30:04,440
Speaker 3: your influence of social rank, with lower ranking individuals being

484
00:30:04,560 --> 00:30:09,200
Speaker 3: more likely to follow the urination of others. So if

485
00:30:09,280 --> 00:30:12,720
Speaker 3: you are a lower ranking chimpanzee in the group, it

486
00:30:12,880 --> 00:30:16,120
Speaker 3: might be more like the boss PE's ip or maybe

487
00:30:16,200 --> 00:30:21,360
Speaker 3: you know the cooler person ps ip. Now some caveats here.

488
00:30:21,720 --> 00:30:25,400
Speaker 3: Obviously this was done in captive chimpanzees, and when a

489
00:30:25,520 --> 00:30:29,120
Speaker 3: behavior is observed in captive animals, it's always worth asking

490
00:30:29,720 --> 00:30:32,360
Speaker 3: whether the same behavior is seen in the wild. Some

491
00:30:33,120 --> 00:30:36,400
Speaker 3: strange traits emerge in zoos or labs or sanctuaries that

492
00:30:36,480 --> 00:30:40,360
Speaker 3: are not seen in wild conspecifics. The researchers here believe

493
00:30:40,440 --> 00:30:42,720
Speaker 3: for a number of reasons that this probably is also

494
00:30:42,800 --> 00:30:45,320
Speaker 3: true in the wild, but that's worth investigating on its

495
00:30:45,320 --> 00:30:49,080
Speaker 3: own and follow up research. But finally we come to

496
00:30:49,160 --> 00:30:53,800
Speaker 3: the question of would this contagious urination count as communication?

497
00:30:54,840 --> 00:30:57,800
Speaker 3: If one ape is getting a signal from another ape

498
00:30:57,920 --> 00:31:01,760
Speaker 3: to do something, I think that is communication. Though it's

499
00:31:01,840 --> 00:31:04,080
Speaker 3: funny because here it's not, as far as we know,

500
00:31:04,320 --> 00:31:07,480
Speaker 3: anything like the smell of my urine will now give

501
00:31:07,520 --> 00:31:10,680
Speaker 3: you updated information about my health that you can use

502
00:31:10,760 --> 00:31:13,920
Speaker 3: in determining how to act. Instead, it's more like the

503
00:31:14,040 --> 00:31:16,720
Speaker 3: fact that I am peeing informs you that it is

504
00:31:16,840 --> 00:31:20,280
Speaker 3: also time for you to pee. Now, what is the

505
00:31:20,440 --> 00:31:23,680
Speaker 3: value of that? Why would it be biologically useful for

506
00:31:23,880 --> 00:31:27,200
Speaker 3: one ape to signal to another that it's time to pee.

507
00:31:28,120 --> 00:31:31,200
Speaker 3: It's possible that it could have some role in maintaining

508
00:31:31,400 --> 00:31:34,440
Speaker 3: general social cohesion in a way that's hard for us

509
00:31:34,520 --> 00:31:37,680
Speaker 3: to understand. So like, when you think about it, a

510
00:31:37,840 --> 00:31:42,960
Speaker 3: lot of synchronized group bonding behaviors among humans would be

511
00:31:43,080 --> 00:31:47,840
Speaker 3: really hard to explain the exact biological utility of except

512
00:31:47,920 --> 00:31:50,880
Speaker 3: to say that we just know because we are humans

513
00:31:50,960 --> 00:31:53,400
Speaker 3: and we know how we feel when we do them.

514
00:31:53,840 --> 00:31:56,240
Speaker 3: We can say that doing these things together at the

515
00:31:56,320 --> 00:31:59,840
Speaker 3: same time makes us feel more bonded and helps motivate

516
00:32:00,080 --> 00:32:03,240
Speaker 3: us to cooperate with each other in other domains. So

517
00:32:03,320 --> 00:32:07,840
Speaker 3: there is clearly some synchronized activities just contribute to social

518
00:32:07,920 --> 00:32:11,800
Speaker 3: cohesion and bonding. Not always easy to say why, but

519
00:32:12,120 --> 00:32:12,360
Speaker 3: they do.

520
00:32:12,880 --> 00:32:14,560
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean you know this way, you're not

521
00:32:14,600 --> 00:32:18,640
Speaker 2: splitting the party every time every time this random individual

522
00:32:18,800 --> 00:32:20,040
Speaker 2: wants to pay or needs to pay.

523
00:32:20,400 --> 00:32:23,960
Speaker 3: Beyond establishing and maintaining social cohesion, there are a few

524
00:32:24,000 --> 00:32:27,920
Speaker 3: other ideas the authors mentioned. One idea is that coordinated

525
00:32:28,040 --> 00:32:32,000
Speaker 3: urination may play, to quote the paper quote, potential roles

526
00:32:32,120 --> 00:32:38,000
Speaker 3: in preparation for collective departure I evoiding before long distance travel.

527
00:32:39,240 --> 00:32:41,760
Speaker 3: So you know, parents may be familiar with this, Like,

528
00:32:41,880 --> 00:32:43,440
Speaker 3: you know, we're about to go on a car trip,

529
00:32:43,520 --> 00:32:45,480
Speaker 3: you need to go to the bathroom before we leave.

530
00:32:46,120 --> 00:32:48,160
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this is a this is a big one.

531
00:32:48,240 --> 00:32:51,720
Speaker 2: This is this is a frequent point of discussion in

532
00:32:51,800 --> 00:32:52,920
Speaker 2: my household and.

533
00:32:53,000 --> 00:32:57,520
Speaker 3: Even apart from long distance travel. One researcher quoted in

534
00:32:57,600 --> 00:33:00,520
Speaker 3: the Scientific American article just pointed out the idea of

535
00:33:00,560 --> 00:33:04,440
Speaker 3: a daily routine among chimpanzees. So at different times throughout

536
00:33:04,480 --> 00:33:08,040
Speaker 3: the day, chimpanzees will often get up and relocate to

537
00:33:08,160 --> 00:33:12,800
Speaker 3: a different place. These relocations as a group are generally

538
00:33:12,880 --> 00:33:16,640
Speaker 3: controlled by higher ranking chimpanzees in the group, the group leaders.

539
00:33:17,040 --> 00:33:20,040
Speaker 3: So it could be that the group leader pees, signaling

540
00:33:21,000 --> 00:33:24,560
Speaker 3: I am about to initiate a relocation, it is time

541
00:33:24,640 --> 00:33:26,840
Speaker 3: for the bathroom break before we move, And then the

542
00:33:27,000 --> 00:33:29,880
Speaker 3: others notice that the leader is peeing and they follow

543
00:33:29,960 --> 00:33:34,600
Speaker 3: suit because they know they're about to relocate. Another possible

544
00:33:34,640 --> 00:33:38,400
Speaker 3: explanation that mentioned the authors mentioned could be quote territorial

545
00:33:38,520 --> 00:33:44,000
Speaker 3: scent marking i e. Coordination of chemosensory signals. So what's

546
00:33:44,080 --> 00:33:47,960
Speaker 3: better than you individually doing a territorial scent mark with

547
00:33:48,040 --> 00:33:50,280
Speaker 3: your pee, getting all your buds to mark at the

548
00:33:50,360 --> 00:33:53,520
Speaker 3: same time. One can imagine that this does a number

549
00:33:53,560 --> 00:33:57,360
Speaker 3: of things. It increases detectability. Allah where we were talking

550
00:33:57,400 --> 00:34:00,280
Speaker 3: about elevated scent marking and dogs, it's important to make

551
00:34:00,360 --> 00:34:04,520
Speaker 3: your scent markings in the environment more detectable. But also

552
00:34:04,640 --> 00:34:08,040
Speaker 3: you can think about the amount of information presented with

553
00:34:08,120 --> 00:34:11,320
Speaker 3: a whole group peeing together instead of just one, you know,

554
00:34:11,440 --> 00:34:16,600
Speaker 3: peeing individually, and maybe also more individuals peeing would communicate

555
00:34:16,719 --> 00:34:19,960
Speaker 3: more of a threat level within the collective mark.

556
00:34:20,160 --> 00:34:24,879
Speaker 2: Yeah, depending on sensitivity to these markers, you might think, okay, well,

557
00:34:24,960 --> 00:34:26,800
Speaker 2: this is either a whole bunch of chimps and not

558
00:34:27,000 --> 00:34:29,799
Speaker 2: just one individual, or if it is one individual, it's

559
00:34:29,840 --> 00:34:33,640
Speaker 2: one huge chimps. There's no messing with this guy. This

560
00:34:33,760 --> 00:34:37,440
Speaker 2: is not potential prey or some chimp that I can

561
00:34:37,600 --> 00:34:40,960
Speaker 2: possibly best and about just best to keep my distance.

562
00:34:41,200 --> 00:34:45,799
Speaker 3: So anyway, chimpanzee p based communication. They pee to communicate

563
00:34:45,960 --> 00:34:51,000
Speaker 3: about peeing for the purpose of peeing. That's fascinating and

564
00:34:51,120 --> 00:34:54,160
Speaker 3: maybe for other purposes as well. But yeah, I thought

565
00:34:54,200 --> 00:34:54,799
Speaker 3: that was good man.

566
00:35:05,040 --> 00:35:08,120
Speaker 2: All Right, as we round out this episode, I want

567
00:35:08,160 --> 00:35:10,560
Speaker 2: to come back to a topic that I've teased out

568
00:35:10,560 --> 00:35:13,040
Speaker 2: a couple of times in the previous episodes. And that

569
00:35:13,280 --> 00:35:18,720
Speaker 2: is the idea that even if humans cannot speak urine

570
00:35:18,880 --> 00:35:22,320
Speaker 2: as well as other creatures, and certainly can't read urine

571
00:35:22,360 --> 00:35:26,000
Speaker 2: as well as other creatures, we do have the advantage

572
00:35:26,040 --> 00:35:29,520
Speaker 2: of having technology. And this is where we get into

573
00:35:29,560 --> 00:35:33,879
Speaker 2: the field of your analysis. Your analysis, via lab work,

574
00:35:34,239 --> 00:35:38,759
Speaker 2: automated systems, and now even artificial intelligence, can reveal quite

575
00:35:38,760 --> 00:35:41,600
Speaker 2: a lot about a person. Your analysis is used to

576
00:35:41,680 --> 00:35:45,239
Speaker 2: detect and manage a wide range of disorders, to check

577
00:35:45,280 --> 00:35:49,200
Speaker 2: overall health, to look for particular conditions, and or to

578
00:35:49,320 --> 00:35:54,879
Speaker 2: manage known conditions. Some very general prognosis can be made

579
00:35:55,040 --> 00:35:57,640
Speaker 2: visually with a human urine sample if you know what

580
00:35:57,719 --> 00:36:01,000
Speaker 2: you're doing. But much in your analysis is revealed via

581
00:36:01,120 --> 00:36:06,120
Speaker 2: lab work and via machines and technology. Yeah, uh, that's

582
00:36:06,160 --> 00:36:07,960
Speaker 2: not going to become as a shocker to many of you.

583
00:36:08,480 --> 00:36:12,839
Speaker 2: We've all had to give urine samples that the doctor before, uh,

584
00:36:12,920 --> 00:36:14,840
Speaker 2: and they've given us the lab read out and or

585
00:36:14,920 --> 00:36:17,640
Speaker 2: we've you know, we've paid for that that uh, that

586
00:36:18,040 --> 00:36:22,520
Speaker 2: lab v on top of our visit. It's worth pointing out,

587
00:36:22,560 --> 00:36:27,240
Speaker 2: by the way, technically urine does contain DNA, but DNA

588
00:36:27,440 --> 00:36:30,719
Speaker 2: deteriorates quickly in human urine and is not the best

589
00:36:30,840 --> 00:36:34,279
Speaker 2: source of DNA for say, forensic analysis and so forth.

590
00:36:35,360 --> 00:36:36,960
Speaker 3: I don't know this is the reason, but I would

591
00:36:37,000 --> 00:36:40,000
Speaker 3: imagine there are other chemicals in the urine that probably

592
00:36:40,120 --> 00:36:42,640
Speaker 3: attack the DNA and break it down.

593
00:36:42,760 --> 00:36:45,400
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's my understanding. Yeah, so you know, things like

594
00:36:45,480 --> 00:36:50,600
Speaker 2: certainly blood saliva, these are far better sources for DNA. So,

595
00:36:51,120 --> 00:36:53,239
Speaker 2: like if you were dealing with like a hardcore like

596
00:36:53,360 --> 00:36:57,120
Speaker 2: TV forensics example, I guess there might be a scenario,

597
00:36:57,200 --> 00:36:59,759
Speaker 2: and there may be scenarios where some sort of a

598
00:37:01,880 --> 00:37:06,239
Speaker 2: usable DNA information is obtainable via urine sample, but for

599
00:37:06,280 --> 00:37:08,239
Speaker 2: the most part, like it's considered like not a great

600
00:37:08,280 --> 00:37:11,520
Speaker 2: source of DNA. Now, in the last episode, we did

601
00:37:11,640 --> 00:37:16,520
Speaker 2: mention in passing the idea of using someone else's urine

602
00:37:17,560 --> 00:37:20,280
Speaker 2: as a way to dupe a drug test, a urinary

603
00:37:20,400 --> 00:37:23,400
Speaker 2: drug test. This is indeed a well known aspect of

604
00:37:23,920 --> 00:37:27,640
Speaker 2: human urine evaluation. Everyone's familiar with this an EVE. If

605
00:37:27,680 --> 00:37:31,000
Speaker 2: you haven't been had your urine tested for work or

606
00:37:31,920 --> 00:37:35,040
Speaker 2: some sort of legal process in the past, you've probably

607
00:37:35,120 --> 00:37:37,560
Speaker 2: seen it on TV. I believe there's a famous episode

608
00:37:37,600 --> 00:37:40,560
Speaker 2: of the Office that I only vaguely remember, but I

609
00:37:40,640 --> 00:37:42,880
Speaker 2: know I've seen it that involves like drug testing of

610
00:37:42,920 --> 00:37:45,360
Speaker 2: the Office, because what Dwight found half a joint in

611
00:37:45,400 --> 00:37:46,040
Speaker 2: the parking lot.

612
00:37:46,360 --> 00:37:48,200
Speaker 3: Oh do they have to pee for that? I don't remember.

613
00:37:48,400 --> 00:37:50,120
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was trying to refresh on this. I think

614
00:37:50,400 --> 00:37:53,440
Speaker 2: like Michael Scott, the boss on The Office, ends up

615
00:37:53,480 --> 00:37:57,680
Speaker 2: getting paranoid because he once quote got high accidentally at

616
00:37:57,680 --> 00:38:02,080
Speaker 2: an Alicia Keys concert, and so he's like trying to

617
00:38:02,120 --> 00:38:05,439
Speaker 2: pressure Dwide into giving him some clean urine that he used.

618
00:38:05,880 --> 00:38:08,520
Speaker 3: Yeah, but though it has played for jokes here, I mean,

619
00:38:08,560 --> 00:38:10,719
Speaker 3: I guess, I guess p fraud is a real thing

620
00:38:10,800 --> 00:38:13,000
Speaker 3: in the world because absolutly some people are going to

621
00:38:13,040 --> 00:38:16,160
Speaker 3: want to avoid the implications of a drug test.

622
00:38:16,480 --> 00:38:18,600
Speaker 2: That's right. And while we did mention the idea of

623
00:38:18,719 --> 00:38:21,360
Speaker 2: using someone else's urine as occurs in this episode of

624
00:38:21,400 --> 00:38:23,480
Speaker 2: The Office or there there's the attempt to do this,

625
00:38:23,960 --> 00:38:26,080
Speaker 2: and I've seen this particular plot point come up in

626
00:38:26,120 --> 00:38:29,080
Speaker 2: other shows as well, we didn't mention another option that

627
00:38:30,080 --> 00:38:33,040
Speaker 2: has certainly entered the market over the past many years,

628
00:38:33,080 --> 00:38:36,480
Speaker 2: and that is the use of synthetic human urine. This

629
00:38:36,680 --> 00:38:39,840
Speaker 2: is indeed apparently a product you can get that at

630
00:38:39,960 --> 00:38:42,040
Speaker 2: least claims you know, I'm not going to get into

631
00:38:42,760 --> 00:38:46,400
Speaker 2: certainly into individual brands or claims made by these brands,

632
00:38:46,800 --> 00:38:49,040
Speaker 2: but you can go to places and you can buy

633
00:38:49,160 --> 00:38:52,719
Speaker 2: something that claims to be synthetic human urine for the

634
00:38:52,920 --> 00:38:57,400
Speaker 2: express purpose of duping a urinary drug testow. Now, this

635
00:38:57,520 --> 00:38:59,959
Speaker 2: may be new to many of you, but to be clear,

636
00:39:00,520 --> 00:39:04,560
Speaker 2: we've actually had synthetic human urine for a very long time.

637
00:39:05,160 --> 00:39:08,719
Speaker 2: I was reading about this at on the website Maoclinic

638
00:39:08,760 --> 00:39:12,160
Speaker 2: Proceedings dot org and they point out that German chemist

639
00:39:12,360 --> 00:39:15,160
Speaker 2: Frederick Wohler, who lived eighteen hundred to eighteen eighty two,

640
00:39:15,520 --> 00:39:18,600
Speaker 2: was the first to produce synthetic urine synthetic human urine

641
00:39:18,800 --> 00:39:20,319
Speaker 2: back in eighteen twenty eight.

642
00:39:20,719 --> 00:39:23,400
Speaker 3: Well, the date on that discovery makes me think that

643
00:39:23,520 --> 00:39:26,080
Speaker 3: that was not intended to fool a drug test, so

644
00:39:26,160 --> 00:39:29,480
Speaker 3: there must be uses for it beyond beyond just the

645
00:39:29,719 --> 00:39:30,240
Speaker 3: p fraud.

646
00:39:30,520 --> 00:39:33,560
Speaker 2: Absolutely, yeah, this was not for a drug test, Welder.

647
00:39:33,600 --> 00:39:36,680
Speaker 2: It was a was a prolific and highly influential chemist.

648
00:39:37,480 --> 00:39:39,280
Speaker 2: We may have brought him up on the show before.

649
00:39:39,280 --> 00:39:42,600
Speaker 2: I feel like there's a strong possibility and the main

650
00:39:42,840 --> 00:39:46,480
Speaker 2: tangible benefit of the at the time for the creation

651
00:39:46,560 --> 00:39:50,160
Speaker 2: of synthetic human urine was for testing of medical equipment,

652
00:39:50,200 --> 00:39:53,320
Speaker 2: and this is something it's still used for today. In fact,

653
00:39:53,480 --> 00:39:55,840
Speaker 2: you can easily you can go online, you can find

654
00:39:56,719 --> 00:40:00,600
Speaker 2: medical grade companies that sell synthetic human urine and it'll

655
00:40:00,680 --> 00:40:04,960
Speaker 2: often be calibrated for very specific testing purposes, like you

656
00:40:05,040 --> 00:40:07,239
Speaker 2: want to test this kind of medical equipment and you

657
00:40:07,360 --> 00:40:10,400
Speaker 2: need synthetic urine to do so. Well, here's the right

658
00:40:10,520 --> 00:40:13,719
Speaker 2: kind of urine for that test, okay. And so that

659
00:40:13,800 --> 00:40:17,399
Speaker 2: was kind of like the broad call for synthetic urine

660
00:40:17,440 --> 00:40:21,200
Speaker 2: at the time, but there was this there's an entire

661
00:40:21,760 --> 00:40:25,200
Speaker 2: additional layer to Frederick go Whulder's contribution here as well.

662
00:40:26,200 --> 00:40:30,239
Speaker 2: So his synthesis of human urea without the aid of

663
00:40:30,280 --> 00:40:35,520
Speaker 2: a human kidney proved that organic compounds could be synthesized

664
00:40:35,960 --> 00:40:39,120
Speaker 2: without the aid of the quote unquote vital force found

665
00:40:39,200 --> 00:40:42,600
Speaker 2: in a living organism, getting here into the vital force

666
00:40:42,680 --> 00:40:46,320
Speaker 2: theory or vitalism, which on the whole argue that you

667
00:40:46,480 --> 00:40:49,960
Speaker 2: could not reduce life to a mechanistic or certainly a

668
00:40:50,080 --> 00:40:54,320
Speaker 2: chemical explanation, like you couldn't you couldn't just create something

669
00:40:54,560 --> 00:40:57,960
Speaker 2: that a human or animal body made, because there is

670
00:40:58,040 --> 00:41:01,440
Speaker 2: something beyond our science in that body that is making

671
00:41:01,719 --> 00:41:03,080
Speaker 2: the substance in question.

672
00:41:04,080 --> 00:41:06,919
Speaker 3: Oh okay, So while I think you could still argue

673
00:41:06,960 --> 00:41:09,560
Speaker 3: today that there might be something in the more ambiguous

674
00:41:09,640 --> 00:41:14,840
Speaker 3: term life that is not quite captured in reproducible chemical experiments,

675
00:41:15,160 --> 00:41:18,239
Speaker 3: basically all of the processes within the body could be

676
00:41:18,400 --> 00:41:19,680
Speaker 3: recreated in the lab.

677
00:41:20,200 --> 00:41:23,120
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think getting back into our own blunted

678
00:41:23,239 --> 00:41:27,120
Speaker 2: human understanding of urine, most people today certainly are not

679
00:41:27,200 --> 00:41:29,239
Speaker 2: going to hear this and think, well, that's blasphemous. You

680
00:41:29,320 --> 00:41:33,160
Speaker 2: can't synthesize human urine. Human urine is holy and it

681
00:41:33,280 --> 00:41:36,200
Speaker 2: is made only by human body. Like, nobody's really probably

682
00:41:36,320 --> 00:41:39,120
Speaker 2: feeling that because we don't think about urine as having

683
00:41:39,160 --> 00:41:42,640
Speaker 2: any intrinsic value. It is just waste product that on

684
00:41:42,760 --> 00:41:45,000
Speaker 2: the whole we prefer not to produce. It just kind

685
00:41:45,040 --> 00:41:48,840
Speaker 2: of gets in the way. Of course, as we've been discussing, dogs, lobsters,

686
00:41:49,200 --> 00:41:53,319
Speaker 2: so many other animals if they could express, if they could,

687
00:41:54,120 --> 00:41:57,600
Speaker 2: you know, express feelings about urine, would disagree with us,

688
00:41:57,600 --> 00:41:59,880
Speaker 2: and they might say no. A dog might say no,

689
00:42:00,280 --> 00:42:04,120
Speaker 2: urine is holy. Urine is information, and it comes from

690
00:42:04,160 --> 00:42:07,920
Speaker 2: a dog or it comes from some other animal, and

691
00:42:08,040 --> 00:42:10,160
Speaker 2: that is what I'm reading, and the idea that you

692
00:42:10,239 --> 00:42:13,960
Speaker 2: could fake that is just you know, abysmal p.

693
00:42:14,239 --> 00:42:15,839
Speaker 3: Is vitalistic poetry. Yeah.

694
00:42:16,360 --> 00:42:18,680
Speaker 2: Yeah, So at the time this was actually a big

695
00:42:18,719 --> 00:42:21,400
Speaker 2: deal though, because even though it was quote unquote just

696
00:42:21,680 --> 00:42:24,840
Speaker 2: urine that was synthesized, it paved the way for so

697
00:42:24,960 --> 00:42:30,319
Speaker 2: many world changing advancements in organic chemistry. So again coming

698
00:42:30,400 --> 00:42:33,480
Speaker 2: back to today, yes, you can buy synthetic urine in

699
00:42:33,640 --> 00:42:40,120
Speaker 2: various places, either for legitimate medical testing purposes, educational purposes,

700
00:42:40,520 --> 00:42:43,880
Speaker 2: but also products that seem to be intended just for

701
00:42:43,960 --> 00:42:45,120
Speaker 2: the duping of drug tests.

702
00:42:45,400 --> 00:42:47,759
Speaker 3: I haven't looked these up. How are they marketed? Do

703
00:42:47,880 --> 00:42:50,239
Speaker 3: they just say like, fool a drug test on them?

704
00:42:50,360 --> 00:42:52,080
Speaker 3: Or do they have euphemistic language.

705
00:42:52,360 --> 00:42:54,800
Speaker 2: I'm not going to mention any products by name, but

706
00:42:54,920 --> 00:42:58,880
Speaker 2: some of them have like expectedly kind of goofy product names.

707
00:43:00,000 --> 00:43:01,960
Speaker 2: You can definitely, or it seems to me, you can

708
00:43:02,040 --> 00:43:06,200
Speaker 2: definitely tell the difference between a product that is marketed

709
00:43:06,360 --> 00:43:10,320
Speaker 2: for clinical usage versus things that are marketed for the

710
00:43:10,400 --> 00:43:14,800
Speaker 2: duping of drug tests. I think it's pretty obvious. But

711
00:43:15,040 --> 00:43:18,400
Speaker 2: these products, if I'm understanding this correctly, and maybe the

712
00:43:19,480 --> 00:43:22,640
Speaker 2: literature is a little incomplete on when things like this

713
00:43:22,760 --> 00:43:25,200
Speaker 2: start popping up. But I believe we've had products like

714
00:43:25,320 --> 00:43:29,239
Speaker 2: this on the market of some sort since like the

715
00:43:29,360 --> 00:43:31,600
Speaker 2: late nineties, so they've been around for a while. I

716
00:43:31,680 --> 00:43:33,080
Speaker 2: had not heard of them, so I thought this was

717
00:43:33,160 --> 00:43:36,960
Speaker 2: maybe like a very new thing, But yeah, these products

718
00:43:37,000 --> 00:43:40,160
Speaker 2: have been around. Some of them are banned in certain areas,

719
00:43:40,280 --> 00:43:44,400
Speaker 2: certain states for example now because of their usage to

720
00:43:44,640 --> 00:43:49,360
Speaker 2: try and dupe at drug test. Now, synthetic you're in

721
00:43:49,520 --> 00:43:52,719
Speaker 2: in general the variety is aimed at drug tests, but

722
00:43:52,800 --> 00:43:56,160
Speaker 2: also clinically they've grown quite advanced, and of course this

723
00:43:56,320 --> 00:43:59,719
Speaker 2: has led to advancements in drug testing. So I was

724
00:43:59,760 --> 00:44:03,080
Speaker 2: reading some some sources here that we're talking about how

725
00:44:04,080 --> 00:44:08,200
Speaker 2: drug tests have had to look for new markers in

726
00:44:08,320 --> 00:44:11,439
Speaker 2: synthetic urines that can then be targeted on a drug

727
00:44:11,560 --> 00:44:13,719
Speaker 2: test so that they can figure out like, Okay, well

728
00:44:13,719 --> 00:44:16,319
Speaker 2: this this is odd. This urine looks clean, but it's

729
00:44:16,320 --> 00:44:19,839
Speaker 2: also obviously purchased, you know, at the local smoke shop.

730
00:44:20,680 --> 00:44:24,120
Speaker 3: This is the evolutionary arms race in the synthetic urine

731
00:44:24,200 --> 00:44:26,000
Speaker 3: and the h and the drug tests.

732
00:44:26,320 --> 00:44:28,080
Speaker 2: Yeah, and of course you can't help but imagine what

733
00:44:28,200 --> 00:44:30,399
Speaker 2: would a dog think of all this? Like they would

734
00:44:30,400 --> 00:44:33,479
Speaker 2: probably like like it would be, like, you know, because

735
00:44:33,480 --> 00:44:36,359
Speaker 2: there's probably a similar discussion to be made around say,

736
00:44:36,640 --> 00:44:40,560
Speaker 2: AI generated literature, you know, where you know, someone might say, well,

737
00:44:40,560 --> 00:44:43,200
Speaker 2: how could you possibly be fooled by this? Like clearly

738
00:44:43,320 --> 00:44:45,200
Speaker 2: was written by a machine and so forth, Like the

739
00:44:45,960 --> 00:44:49,640
Speaker 2: dogs probably have a very low would have a very

740
00:44:49,760 --> 00:44:53,680
Speaker 2: uh like low estimation of synthetic urines and like what

741
00:44:53,800 --> 00:44:55,360
Speaker 2: it's telling them. Though I guess that's a that's a

742
00:44:55,360 --> 00:44:58,520
Speaker 2: whole topic under it unto itself that we're not really

743
00:44:58,560 --> 00:45:00,719
Speaker 2: going to get into today, into the like to what

744
00:45:00,960 --> 00:45:05,720
Speaker 2: degree does synthetic urine fool animals that have these heightened

745
00:45:05,760 --> 00:45:06,800
Speaker 2: senses to understand it?

746
00:45:07,239 --> 00:45:11,320
Speaker 3: Or I wonder would the dog really have the concept

747
00:45:11,400 --> 00:45:14,520
Speaker 3: of authenticity when reading the urine or would it just

748
00:45:14,600 --> 00:45:16,560
Speaker 3: be like, huh, this is from a strange type of

749
00:45:16,600 --> 00:45:18,240
Speaker 3: creature I've never encountered before.

750
00:45:18,560 --> 00:45:21,040
Speaker 2: That's right, It would maybe be more like, this is

751
00:45:21,120 --> 00:45:24,600
Speaker 2: a this is a weird communication that I'm reading. This

752
00:45:24,760 --> 00:45:28,440
Speaker 2: is a very strange dog. More information is required. I

753
00:45:28,480 --> 00:45:30,960
Speaker 2: probably need to see this dog in person now to

754
00:45:31,000 --> 00:45:33,359
Speaker 2: be clear. Outside of the market for synthetic human urine,

755
00:45:33,400 --> 00:45:36,440
Speaker 2: there is also a market for synthetic animal urines.

756
00:45:38,160 --> 00:45:41,440
Speaker 3: Wait a minute. For Could this be for scent marking

757
00:45:41,560 --> 00:45:43,760
Speaker 3: fraud essentially carried out by humans?

758
00:45:44,080 --> 00:45:48,120
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, in instances where there is some sort of

759
00:45:48,160 --> 00:45:54,360
Speaker 2: a human interest involved in some sort of communication fraud

760
00:45:54,520 --> 00:45:57,120
Speaker 2: with animal urine. One example of this that you can

761
00:45:57,160 --> 00:46:01,800
Speaker 2: find pretty readily, say online, is synthetic deer urine. And

762
00:46:02,400 --> 00:46:06,200
Speaker 2: this is apparently a product that exists because you have

763
00:46:06,480 --> 00:46:10,080
Speaker 2: in the past used actual deer urine to say, you know,

764
00:46:10,239 --> 00:46:13,799
Speaker 2: bait a buck, that sort of a thing. But there

765
00:46:13,840 --> 00:46:16,839
Speaker 2: are a number of states that have banned the use

766
00:46:17,320 --> 00:46:20,239
Speaker 2: of actual deer urine to help prevent the spread of

767
00:46:20,320 --> 00:46:24,279
Speaker 2: chronic wasting disease and deer ah. Okay, yeah, Because to

768
00:46:24,400 --> 00:46:27,919
Speaker 2: come back to urine in general, like urine, healthy human urine,

769
00:46:27,960 --> 00:46:33,080
Speaker 2: for example, is generally thought to be largely sterile. But yes,

770
00:46:33,440 --> 00:46:37,160
Speaker 2: there are various things that can be various contaminants, various

771
00:46:37,239 --> 00:46:40,399
Speaker 2: illnesses that can be contracted through unhealthy urine.

772
00:46:40,719 --> 00:46:44,279
Speaker 3: So this would be using animal urine fraud for the

773
00:46:44,360 --> 00:46:48,320
Speaker 3: purpose of an attractant by hunters. But I've read about

774
00:46:48,600 --> 00:46:52,680
Speaker 3: animal urine fraud being used for the opposite purpose to

775
00:46:52,840 --> 00:46:57,120
Speaker 3: deter animals by using a predator urine. So you synthesize

776
00:46:57,239 --> 00:46:59,680
Speaker 3: there's not really a cougar in the area, but you

777
00:47:00,080 --> 00:47:02,600
Speaker 3: put cougar pee out there, and it supposedly it will

778
00:47:02,680 --> 00:47:05,480
Speaker 3: keep away the pest animals that you don't want in

779
00:47:05,520 --> 00:47:06,479
Speaker 3: your garden or whatever.

780
00:47:06,880 --> 00:47:10,319
Speaker 2: Exactly. Yes, and that is the other major synthetic urine

781
00:47:10,320 --> 00:47:12,480
Speaker 2: product that you see. And this is another case though,

782
00:47:12,520 --> 00:47:15,759
Speaker 2: where there are products that at least claim to use

783
00:47:15,920 --> 00:47:20,880
Speaker 2: actual urine from say fox or a bear, or you know,

784
00:47:20,960 --> 00:47:25,040
Speaker 2: whatever whatever the predator happens to be, and then there

785
00:47:25,080 --> 00:47:27,040
Speaker 2: are cases where they're making a point of it being

786
00:47:27,080 --> 00:47:30,839
Speaker 2: synthetic animal urine. I can't speak to the to how

787
00:47:30,920 --> 00:47:34,160
Speaker 2: efficient these are, but you know, coming back to our

788
00:47:34,239 --> 00:47:37,160
Speaker 2: dog example, if they are efficient enough to like raise

789
00:47:37,239 --> 00:47:41,120
Speaker 2: the specter of a potential predator being present, then perhaps

790
00:47:41,360 --> 00:47:45,759
Speaker 2: it is useful enough. We talked about chimpanzees. I want

791
00:47:45,800 --> 00:47:48,839
Speaker 2: to mention that for medical purposes, you can also buy

792
00:47:48,920 --> 00:47:53,879
Speaker 2: synthetic chimpanzee urine. I included a link here for you, Joe.

793
00:47:54,520 --> 00:47:56,759
Speaker 2: If you look around for it, you can find it.

794
00:47:56,800 --> 00:47:59,480
Speaker 2: There's one company in particular that has a website and

795
00:47:59,640 --> 00:48:02,960
Speaker 2: they have various forms of synthetic human urine that is

796
00:48:03,280 --> 00:48:06,600
Speaker 2: to be clear intended for clinical purposes and the testing

797
00:48:06,760 --> 00:48:10,680
Speaker 2: of like medical equipment and tests and educational purposes as well.

798
00:48:10,960 --> 00:48:13,920
Speaker 2: But you can also buy synthetic chimpanzee urine for the

799
00:48:14,000 --> 00:48:18,919
Speaker 2: same purpose, because, of course the study of chimpanzee physiology

800
00:48:19,080 --> 00:48:24,600
Speaker 2: and chimpanzee biological responses is vitally important for human medicine

801
00:48:24,600 --> 00:48:24,920
Speaker 2: as well.

802
00:48:25,239 --> 00:48:28,160
Speaker 3: But is it cheaper than the synthetic human urine And

803
00:48:28,280 --> 00:48:31,200
Speaker 3: if so, with somebody trying to pass the drug tests,

804
00:48:31,239 --> 00:48:34,200
Speaker 3: save a few bucks and get the chimpanzee urine instead.

805
00:48:34,960 --> 00:48:38,839
Speaker 2: Well, let's check real quick. I'll pull up the website. Okay,

806
00:48:38,920 --> 00:48:42,000
Speaker 2: I'm looking at the costs for simulated monkey urine. Okay,

807
00:48:42,200 --> 00:48:45,320
Speaker 2: all right, okay, and then let's see. You know, it

808
00:48:45,400 --> 00:48:47,520
Speaker 2: looks about like it's the same price for humans, so

809
00:48:47,600 --> 00:48:52,000
Speaker 2: there's no there's no need to go cheaper for chimp urine.

810
00:48:52,800 --> 00:48:55,040
Speaker 2: I have a feeling chimp urine would not work. I

811
00:48:55,120 --> 00:48:56,759
Speaker 2: feel like they would catch you if you try to

812
00:48:56,840 --> 00:49:00,520
Speaker 2: use chimp urine to synthetic chimp urine to pass like

813
00:49:00,560 --> 00:49:03,560
Speaker 2: a work drug test. But also I should add that

814
00:49:03,880 --> 00:49:06,759
Speaker 2: you're probably I'm thinking most of the people trying to

815
00:49:07,040 --> 00:49:10,320
Speaker 2: pass a drug test using the synthetic urine They're probably

816
00:49:10,400 --> 00:49:13,320
Speaker 2: not buying it from a biomedical company. They're buying it

817
00:49:14,000 --> 00:49:16,160
Speaker 2: a like at the local smoke shop or something from

818
00:49:16,239 --> 00:49:20,160
Speaker 2: some other supplier, which I'm assuming are you know, ultimately

819
00:49:20,280 --> 00:49:21,800
Speaker 2: not the same corporation.

820
00:49:22,520 --> 00:49:24,920
Speaker 3: Listeners, if anybody in the audience has ever tried to

821
00:49:24,960 --> 00:49:28,280
Speaker 3: spoof a drug test by using like cougar urine or something,

822
00:49:29,960 --> 00:49:32,200
Speaker 3: let us know how that went. Did it work?

823
00:49:32,960 --> 00:49:35,040
Speaker 2: Yeah? Or in general, if there are people out there

824
00:49:35,040 --> 00:49:40,120
Speaker 2: who have experience using synthetic animal urines either to attract

825
00:49:40,719 --> 00:49:44,759
Speaker 2: or drive away organisms, write in with your experiences with

826
00:49:44,840 --> 00:49:46,800
Speaker 2: these products. You know, we're not going to mention specific products,

827
00:49:47,160 --> 00:49:49,920
Speaker 2: you know, obviously, but in general, I'd love to hear

828
00:49:50,000 --> 00:49:52,440
Speaker 2: how this has worked. Like maybe get an idea of

829
00:49:52,560 --> 00:49:55,040
Speaker 2: like where the where the science is in terms of

830
00:49:55,160 --> 00:49:59,200
Speaker 2: making synthetic urine that can not only be useful for

831
00:49:59,320 --> 00:50:02,600
Speaker 2: biomedical purposes and testing equipment in the human world, but

832
00:50:02,800 --> 00:50:06,920
Speaker 2: potentially in communicating with other animals, even in a very

833
00:50:06,960 --> 00:50:07,720
Speaker 2: blunt manner.

834
00:50:08,160 --> 00:50:10,400
Speaker 3: Yeah. Oh, and hey, we also we know we've got

835
00:50:10,440 --> 00:50:12,480
Speaker 3: a lot of scientists in the audience. If you use

836
00:50:12,560 --> 00:50:15,080
Speaker 3: synthetic you're in in your research, Let us know how

837
00:50:15,160 --> 00:50:16,040
Speaker 3: what do you use it for?

838
00:50:16,520 --> 00:50:19,680
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. All right, on that note, we're going to

839
00:50:19,680 --> 00:50:21,680
Speaker 2: go ahead and close out this episode, but yeah, right in,

840
00:50:21,760 --> 00:50:23,640
Speaker 2: we'd love to hear from everyone. Just remind it that

841
00:50:23,680 --> 00:50:25,560
Speaker 2: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and

842
00:50:25,600 --> 00:50:28,440
Speaker 2: culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and

843
00:50:28,520 --> 00:50:30,880
Speaker 2: on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just

844
00:50:30,920 --> 00:50:33,320
Speaker 2: talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

845
00:50:33,600 --> 00:50:37,280
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.

846
00:50:37,400 --> 00:50:38,840
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us

847
00:50:38,880 --> 00:50:41,320
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest

848
00:50:41,360 --> 00:50:43,399
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,

849
00:50:43,840 --> 00:50:46,319
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact death, Stuff to Blow

850
00:50:46,360 --> 00:50:47,279
Speaker 3: your Mind dot com.

851
00:50:55,320 --> 00:50:58,239
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852
00:50:58,360 --> 00:51:01,080
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853
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