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