May 26, 2026 • 49 mins
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the amazing social power of urine, especially as it relates to urine-based communication in the animal world. (part 1 of 3) (originally published 5/15/2025)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb. We are on vacation this week,
so it's a great time to go ahead. And Rea
air all three parts of our You've Got Femail series.
This is part one of three and originally published five
point fifteen twenty five.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
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
(01:02):
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
(01:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
I only want to read books in SMS format now.
But I think gets 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
(02:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
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. Giggling is still permitted, but
rethink you're in a bed. As we proceed here.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
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
(03:21):
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 Serrado, another with the Marine Mammal Institute
(03:42):
of Oregon State University in the United States, and the
third with Trent University in Ontario, Canada.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
I believe they were all.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Associated to some extent with a research group called Cetasia
Cetasia based in Canada, but this stot he concerns individuals
of the species any Jeffrentsis, also known as the boto
or the pink river dolphin or the Amazon river dolphin.
(04:12):
Rob Have we ever done a long look at river
dolphins on the show? I don't think, so, I.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Yeah, these aren't just your bottle noes. This has a
distinctly alt dolphin feel.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
So.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
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
(05:01):
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
(05:24):
a mid length corner gently sloping down to the tail.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Yeah, and I just find they do just look bizarre.
They To me, they kind of look like if the
cenobytes 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.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Yeah, I mean it's a little easier to take 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 right, but they're
also they're a little bit weird.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
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
(06:38):
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 dolphins pinkness.
(06:58):
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 this species, generally in a twenty sixteen feature put
out by the American Association for the Advancement of Science
written by someone named Kirsten Fernlely, and this article mentions
(07:18):
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,
(07:40):
pretty weird, rob, I've got a picture in the outline
for you to look at this. Dolphins it's like saying.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Hi, Yeah, it's a little bit creepy.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
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 lower jaw. Especially, bodos apparently eat
(08:12):
lots of different kinds of prey fish, crustaceans, reptiles which
they catch in their long jaws. They apparently have different
kinds of teeth in 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
(08:35):
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
(08:57):
adults live alone, the solitary species.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
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 knew of them long
before the arrival of Europeans. Naturally, unfortunately, not much seems
to have survived concerning exactly how those people in pre
(09:22):
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
(09:45):
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, the Boto can
transform itself into a handsome Caucasian male to dance boldly
(10:05):
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 used to explain certain teenage pregnancies that occur,
and more generally, I've seen the legend explain as something
(10:27):
that was originally a warning against the dangers posed by
male colonists in potential sexual violence. The nib dot com
has a really good webcomic 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
(10:50):
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 ether.
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
(11:11):
then apply that to your own genitals as a magic
pleasure or fertility boosting powder. The authors in that paper
I sided, 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
(11:31):
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
(11:54):
a terrifying shape shifting seducer, and maybe this has something
to do with its coloration and it's kind of fleshy
aspect of its body. Maybe that's what leads to some
of these some variations of these beliefs that it can
take on the form of a human being.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
But anyway, coming to the scientific paper we're going to
talk about, this will give you another very different.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
Way to think about the bodo.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
So in this paper from Behavioral Processes in twenty twenty five,
again that's a ruho wang at all, the authors describe
recent observations, or 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
(13:01):
pea fountains. So the pea fountain behaviors documented in this
research took place among wild botos in a river in
central Brazil called the Tokentines 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
(13:24):
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
(13:48):
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
(14:11):
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?
Speaker 1 (14:20):
I know humans would never, right, so why would the dolphins?
Speaker 3 (14:24):
I was exactly trying to think about when humans would
make a point to like submertin just barely submerge their
bodies under the water in order to pee. I guess
the main reason I could think 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.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
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 your ow nation streams, they
are liable to do novel things with their control within
(15:08):
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 and so forth. Or
maybe one is urinating in the wild and there is
like one rock that calls out more than other rocks.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
Sure, that's yeah, uh huh, I see what you're saying.
So it can be a form of play or self.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
Amusement in a way.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
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.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
So there would be.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
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
(16:09):
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
(16:30):
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
(16:52):
urine splash down and run over its rostrum, which is
what the dolphin's protruding beak like jaw is called.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Again, humans would never so what's going on with these
river dolphins.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
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.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
So that brings us to the question.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
Of why do they do this? Why would the dolphin
pee this way? And why would the other dolphin 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.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
It is.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
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 it seeks
out the stream of urine is listening. Now, what would
they be talking about. Possibly it would be the dolphins
(18:07):
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
(18:29):
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
(18:50):
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,
(19:14):
it's kind of like the ringing of the telephone. It
is alerting you to come get the message, which you
would receive by getting 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
(19:36):
could be that that's a ring tone.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Ah, Now that is fascinating.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
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 botos 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
(20:01):
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
swimming upside down helps them see what's below them.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
M Okay.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
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,
(20:48):
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
(21:11):
dolphin's mouth are 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.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Yeah, a little bit of 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
(21:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
Play, that's right, And so that's what the authors hypothesize here.
They say that maybeuning and foraging and river mud is
not the only thing these.
Speaker 4 (22:03):
Bristles are used for.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
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.
(22:28):
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.
Speaker 4 (22:43):
But if this.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
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 mail for access to
food resources and mating with nearby females. Like it's kind
(23:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
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?
(23:38):
Who do they think they are? Well, I can't check
their like, LinkedIn profile or their social media page, but
I can test their urine and read that for more information.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
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 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
(24:09):
this is a good evolutionary compromise that allows animals to
avoid violence and unnecessary aggression. It's kind of like allowing
animals to get a sense of like, it's not worth
fighting here, we can avoid a fight.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
That's a very good point.
Speaker 4 (24:26):
Yes, So if it is indeed.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
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.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
This would be far.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
From the only example in the animal world. Lots of
animals use urination to convey information. I was reading an
article cover 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
(25:12):
University of Hull in England named Thomas Brethout and Brighteout says, quote,
animals in general want to learn as much as they
can 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
(25:32):
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?
(25:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
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 if you
know you're not hopefully nobody's going to start a fight.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
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 still let you
know where you rank.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
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 rostrums, 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
(27:24):
assumptions about what the different senses are for. Like we
think of sight as a general purpose sense, 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,
(27:48):
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 to the toxic
threat potential of foods.
Speaker 4 (28:03):
So taste tells.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
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 a reason based around questions of practicality, like how
(28:25):
practical is it to get other types of information by taste.
Speaker 4 (28:28):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Or if you're a human geologist, right, we've talked about that.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Yes, 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. Orse, I'm not recommending you
lick people. It's just interesting to sometimes stop and think
(29:06):
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
(29:26):
there's no there's no contradiction in that.
Speaker 4 (29:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
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
(29:52):
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 then there's also a
strong case to be made that the sense of smell
is even a more intimate sensory experience compared to taste.
(30:13):
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
(30:35):
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, this example of the of
the dolphins deciding to pee, and then peeing providing that information,
and then another dolphin decides to go and taste and
(30:56):
interpret it.
Speaker 4 (30:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Yeah, that's a good question itself. Why do animal have
voluntary control over when they do it?
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Yeah, this is one of those things.
Speaker 4 (31:05):
You know.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
Right, and then, of course, if there is something interfering
with your ability to pee, it's kind of all you
can think about.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Right, 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,
(31:45):
and crocodiles do not have urinary bladders. Birds don't have
a urethra and instead excrete everything through the cloaca, and
as Lewis Bilson 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.
(32:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:18):
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 p 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
(32:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
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
(33:09):
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?
Speaker 3 (33:18):
I recall this came up a bit in our episodes
on eurohedrosis, which was the thing about birds pooping on
their own legs in order to gain the benefits of
evaporative cooling.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
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
(33:52):
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 urin ordinary 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
(34:13):
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
(34:35):
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 Mochopodhey and Stowers, And
(34:57):
as the title suggests, it really is 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 that neat? But we often
(35:20):
don't think about it like we 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
(35:40):
of the artificial privacy of you know, like little walls
at the urnal stalls and so forth.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
It's one of the most anti social things we do,
I would think.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
The bumper stickers are dedicated to that's true.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
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 certainly to use the
restroom as opposed to the corner of the movie theater,
you are carefully fitting your urination into your social environment.
The authors point out that humans are regularly consciously checking
(36:31):
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
(36:52):
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.
Speaker 4 (36:57):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
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 potentially 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.
(37:33):
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
(37:55):
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 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
(38:16):
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
(38:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
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
(39:12):
with your urine. I think there's probably a lot less control,
maybe no control for most species, over what you say
with your urine. Instead, it's a question of when and
how and where.
Speaker 4 (39:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
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
a good teaser. Yeah, you may in fact be able
to lie even with p but we'll explore that.
Speaker 4 (39:42):
As we go on.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
This is something I was wondering about. Certain 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.
Speaker 4 (40:16):
An effect based on that A lot of I don't know.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
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
too imply that humans, you know, I mean, we do
not have the same sense of smell. We don't do
not live in the same sense universe as a dog
or even a cat. But you know, we can still
(40:48):
smell an impressive number of different sense I've read as
high as like one trillion different since and certainly you
know I can. I can say that I can tell
the difference between the 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 sents that's not
(41:09):
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 and 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
(41:31):
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
(41:53):
make it a story. Yeah, you know, it's a fool's there,
and I think in the end to try and fully
put ourselves in the mind so 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
(42:16):
to since things with so much more clarity.
Speaker 3 (42:19):
And you could probably tell that just intuitively 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.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
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 sniffer. Two. I have to I have
to bring this back to where 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,
(42:59):
if you're not with Terry Pratchett, you know, writes these
wonderful wrote these wonderful novels set in the fantasy world
of Discworld, full of Monty python esque humor, lots of
silly stuff. But he also had a real gift for
insightful commentary as well. And h and yeah, so you know,
(43:19):
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, a member of the Night's Watch whose
whose name is ongo Of von Uberwald, and she is
a were wolf, and he he describes her ability to
smell several times in the book, she's investigating things and
(43:42):
leaning on her werewolf senses to smell the environment, and
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 it's it's challenging to describe
this sort of thing, something that's really foreign to our smell, dull,
(44:05):
visually focused existence. But the closest way you might be
able to describe something like this is that this werewolf
character she can see through time with her sense of smell.
She can 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 a various other
(44:26):
animals that have heightened senses of smells when they are
picking up on odors like this.
Speaker 4 (44:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
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
(44:54):
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 are just
it's far blunt or instrumentation.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
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
(45:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
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
(46:03):
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
(46:24):
little while I remember that being.
Speaker 4 (46:25):
In the news. I'm not going to comment on that.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
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?
Speaker 3 (46:44):
Mm, so, like we could we talk urine even if
we can't really understand urine?
Speaker 1 (46:49):
Yeah, yeah, and I mean largely no, but sort of
yes too, according to some in a very one directional way.
Never 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
(47:11):
they honored his marked 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
(47:31):
one way urine communication.
Speaker 4 (47:34):
Oh yeah, I can see that, and I'm.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
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 while 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,
(47:56):
if we were using our technology on like both ends
of the conversation. I'm not sure what that would look
like of why that would be, but maybe we'll get
into that later.
Speaker 3 (48:07):
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 party, maybe multiple parts,
with more fascinating examples of urine based communication. What can
the p say and what can we hear?
Speaker 1 (48:22):
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
wherever you get your podcasts, wherever that might be. We
(48:44):
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are s t B y M podcast huge, thanks.
Speaker 3 (49:03):
As always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb. We are on vacation this week,
so it's a great time to go ahead. And Rea
air all three parts of our You've Got Femail series.
This is part one of three and originally published five
point fifteen twenty five.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
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
(01:02):
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
(01:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
I only want to read books in SMS format now.
But I think gets 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
(02:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
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. Giggling is still permitted, but
rethink you're in a bed. As we proceed here.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
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
(03:21):
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 Serrado, another with the Marine Mammal Institute
(03:42):
of Oregon State University in the United States, and the
third with Trent University in Ontario, Canada.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
I believe they were all.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Associated to some extent with a research group called Cetasia
Cetasia based in Canada, but this stot he concerns individuals
of the species any Jeffrentsis, also known as the boto
or the pink river dolphin or the Amazon river dolphin.
(04:12):
Rob Have we ever done a long look at river
dolphins on the show? I don't think, so, I.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Yeah, these aren't just your bottle noes. This has a
distinctly alt dolphin feel.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
So.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
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
(05:01):
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
(05:24):
a mid length corner gently sloping down to the tail.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Yeah, and I just find they do just look bizarre.
They To me, they kind of look like if the
cenobytes 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.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Yeah, I mean it's a little easier to take 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 right, but they're
also they're a little bit weird.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
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
(06:38):
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 dolphins pinkness.
(06:58):
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 this species, generally in a twenty sixteen feature put
out by the American Association for the Advancement of Science
written by someone named Kirsten Fernlely, and this article mentions
(07:18):
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,
(07:40):
pretty weird, rob, I've got a picture in the outline
for you to look at this. Dolphins it's like saying.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Hi, Yeah, it's a little bit creepy.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
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 lower jaw. Especially, bodos apparently eat
(08:12):
lots of different kinds of prey fish, crustaceans, reptiles which
they catch in their long jaws. They apparently have different
kinds of teeth in 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
(08:35):
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
(08:57):
adults live alone, the solitary species.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
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 knew of them long
before the arrival of Europeans. Naturally, unfortunately, not much seems
to have survived concerning exactly how those people in pre
(09:22):
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
(09:45):
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, the Boto can
transform itself into a handsome Caucasian male to dance boldly
(10:05):
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 used to explain certain teenage pregnancies that occur,
and more generally, I've seen the legend explain as something
(10:27):
that was originally a warning against the dangers posed by
male colonists in potential sexual violence. The nib dot com
has a really good webcomic 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
(10:50):
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 ether.
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
(11:11):
then apply that to your own genitals as a magic
pleasure or fertility boosting powder. The authors in that paper
I sided, 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
(11:31):
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
(11:54):
a terrifying shape shifting seducer, and maybe this has something
to do with its coloration and it's kind of fleshy
aspect of its body. Maybe that's what leads to some
of these some variations of these beliefs that it can
take on the form of a human being.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
But anyway, coming to the scientific paper we're going to
talk about, this will give you another very different.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
Way to think about the bodo.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
So in this paper from Behavioral Processes in twenty twenty five,
again that's a ruho wang at all, the authors describe
recent observations, or 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
(13:01):
pea fountains. So the pea fountain behaviors documented in this
research took place among wild botos in a river in
central Brazil called the Tokentines 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
(13:24):
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
(13:48):
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
(14:11):
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?
Speaker 1 (14:20):
I know humans would never, right, so why would the dolphins?
Speaker 3 (14:24):
I was exactly trying to think about when humans would
make a point to like submertin just barely submerge their
bodies under the water in order to pee. I guess
the main reason I could think 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.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
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 your ow nation streams, they
are liable to do novel things with their control within
(15:08):
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 and so forth. Or
maybe one is urinating in the wild and there is
like one rock that calls out more than other rocks.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
Sure, that's yeah, uh huh, I see what you're saying.
So it can be a form of play or self.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
Amusement in a way.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
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.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
So there would be.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
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
(16:09):
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
(16:30):
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
(16:52):
urine splash down and run over its rostrum, which is
what the dolphin's protruding beak like jaw is called.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Again, humans would never so what's going on with these
river dolphins.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
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.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
So that brings us to the question.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
Of why do they do this? Why would the dolphin
pee this way? And why would the other dolphin 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.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
It is.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
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 it seeks
out the stream of urine is listening. Now, what would
they be talking about. Possibly it would be the dolphins
(18:07):
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
(18:29):
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
(18:50):
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,
(19:14):
it's kind of like the ringing of the telephone. It
is alerting you to come get the message, which you
would receive by getting 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
(19:36):
could be that that's a ring tone.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Ah, Now that is fascinating.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
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 botos 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
(20:01):
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
swimming upside down helps them see what's below them.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
M Okay.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
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,
(20:48):
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
(21:11):
dolphin's mouth are 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.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Yeah, a little bit of 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
(21:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
Play, that's right, And so that's what the authors hypothesize here.
They say that maybeuning and foraging and river mud is
not the only thing these.
Speaker 4 (22:03):
Bristles are used for.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
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.
(22:28):
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.
Speaker 4 (22:43):
But if this.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
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 mail for access to
food resources and mating with nearby females. Like it's kind
(23:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
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?
(23:38):
Who do they think they are? Well, I can't check
their like, LinkedIn profile or their social media page, but
I can test their urine and read that for more information.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
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 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
(24:09):
this is a good evolutionary compromise that allows animals to
avoid violence and unnecessary aggression. It's kind of like allowing
animals to get a sense of like, it's not worth
fighting here, we can avoid a fight.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
That's a very good point.
Speaker 4 (24:26):
Yes, So if it is indeed.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
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.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
This would be far.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
From the only example in the animal world. Lots of
animals use urination to convey information. I was reading an
article cover 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
(25:12):
University of Hull in England named Thomas Brethout and Brighteout says, quote,
animals in general want to learn as much as they
can 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
(25:32):
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?
(25:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
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 if you
know you're not hopefully nobody's going to start a fight.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
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 still let you
know where you rank.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
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 rostrums, 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
(27:24):
assumptions about what the different senses are for. Like we
think of sight as a general purpose sense, 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,
(27:48):
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 to the toxic
threat potential of foods.
Speaker 4 (28:03):
So taste tells.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
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 a reason based around questions of practicality, like how
(28:25):
practical is it to get other types of information by taste.
Speaker 4 (28:28):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Or if you're a human geologist, right, we've talked about that.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Yes, 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. Orse, I'm not recommending you
lick people. It's just interesting to sometimes stop and think
(29:06):
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
(29:26):
there's no there's no contradiction in that.
Speaker 4 (29:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
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
(29:52):
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 then there's also a
strong case to be made that the sense of smell
is even a more intimate sensory experience compared to taste.
(30:13):
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
(30:35):
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, this example of the of
the dolphins deciding to pee, and then peeing providing that information,
and then another dolphin decides to go and taste and
(30:56):
interpret it.
Speaker 4 (30:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Yeah, that's a good question itself. Why do animal have
voluntary control over when they do it?
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Yeah, this is one of those things.
Speaker 4 (31:05):
You know.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
Right, and then, of course, if there is something interfering
with your ability to pee, it's kind of all you
can think about.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Right, 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,
(31:45):
and crocodiles do not have urinary bladders. Birds don't have
a urethra and instead excrete everything through the cloaca, and
as Lewis Bilson 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.
(32:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:18):
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 p 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
(32:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
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
(33:09):
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?
Speaker 3 (33:18):
I recall this came up a bit in our episodes
on eurohedrosis, which was the thing about birds pooping on
their own legs in order to gain the benefits of
evaporative cooling.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
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
(33:52):
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 urin ordinary 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
(34:13):
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
(34:35):
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 Mochopodhey and Stowers, And
(34:57):
as the title suggests, it really is 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 that neat? But we often
(35:20):
don't think about it like we 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
(35:40):
of the artificial privacy of you know, like little walls
at the urnal stalls and so forth.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
It's one of the most anti social things we do,
I would think.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
The bumper stickers are dedicated to that's true.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
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 certainly to use the
restroom as opposed to the corner of the movie theater,
you are carefully fitting your urination into your social environment.
The authors point out that humans are regularly consciously checking
(36:31):
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
(36:52):
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.
Speaker 4 (36:57):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
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 potentially 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.
(37:33):
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
(37:55):
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 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
(38:16):
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
(38:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
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
(39:12):
with your urine. I think there's probably a lot less control,
maybe no control for most species, over what you say
with your urine. Instead, it's a question of when and
how and where.
Speaker 4 (39:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
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
a good teaser. Yeah, you may in fact be able
to lie even with p but we'll explore that.
Speaker 4 (39:42):
As we go on.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
This is something I was wondering about. Certain 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.
Speaker 4 (40:16):
An effect based on that A lot of I don't know.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
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
too imply that humans, you know, I mean, we do
not have the same sense of smell. We don't do
not live in the same sense universe as a dog
or even a cat. But you know, we can still
(40:48):
smell an impressive number of different sense I've read as
high as like one trillion different since and certainly you
know I can. I can say that I can tell
the difference between the 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 sents that's not
(41:09):
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 and 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
(41:31):
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
(41:53):
make it a story. Yeah, you know, it's a fool's there,
and I think in the end to try and fully
put ourselves in the mind so 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
(42:16):
to since things with so much more clarity.
Speaker 3 (42:19):
And you could probably tell that just intuitively 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.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
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 sniffer. Two. I have to I have
to bring this back to where 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,
(42:59):
if you're not with Terry Pratchett, you know, writes these
wonderful wrote these wonderful novels set in the fantasy world
of Discworld, full of Monty python esque humor, lots of
silly stuff. But he also had a real gift for
insightful commentary as well. And h and yeah, so you know,
(43:19):
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, a member of the Night's Watch whose
whose name is ongo Of von Uberwald, and she is
a were wolf, and he he describes her ability to
smell several times in the book, she's investigating things and
(43:42):
leaning on her werewolf senses to smell the environment, and
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 it's it's challenging to describe
this sort of thing, something that's really foreign to our smell, dull,
(44:05):
visually focused existence. But the closest way you might be
able to describe something like this is that this werewolf
character she can see through time with her sense of smell.
She can 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 a various other
(44:26):
animals that have heightened senses of smells when they are
picking up on odors like this.
Speaker 4 (44:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
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
(44:54):
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 are just
it's far blunt or instrumentation.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
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
(45:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
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
(46:03):
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
(46:24):
little while I remember that being.
Speaker 4 (46:25):
In the news. I'm not going to comment on that.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
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?
Speaker 3 (46:44):
Mm, so, like we could we talk urine even if
we can't really understand urine?
Speaker 1 (46:49):
Yeah, yeah, and I mean largely no, but sort of
yes too, according to some in a very one directional way.
Never 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
(47:11):
they honored his marked 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
(47:31):
one way urine communication.
Speaker 4 (47:34):
Oh yeah, I can see that, and I'm.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
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 while 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,
(47:56):
if we were using our technology on like both ends
of the conversation. I'm not sure what that would look
like of why that would be, but maybe we'll get
into that later.
Speaker 3 (48:07):
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 party, maybe multiple parts,
with more fascinating examples of urine based communication. What can
the p say and what can we hear?
Speaker 1 (48:22):
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
wherever you get your podcasts, wherever that might be. We
(48:44):
haven't asked in a little bit on this front, but
if you have the ability to rate and review us,
leave us a rating, leave us a nice review, throw
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if you want to follow us on social media, you
can find us in various places on Instagram, Ram. We
are s t B y M podcast huge, thanks.
Speaker 3 (49:03):
As always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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