May 30, 2026 • 51 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 3 of 3) (originally published 5/22/2025)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. Again, we are on vacation this week,
so you've got femail, Part three of three airing right now.
Originally published five two, twenty twenty five. What more could
you possibly want new episodes? Well, we'll have this for
you next week. Hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part three in our series on urine based communication in
the animal Kingdom. Humans, of course have the gift of language,
which is a wonderful multimodal information sharing tool of infinite versatility,
and the fact that we possess the capacity for complex lange,
(01:00):
which is maybe the most unique and amazing thing about
us as a species. But one mode of communication that
we don't really use, but which is quite popular throughout
the animal kingdom is communication through urine. So in the
last couple of episodes we discussed a whole bunch of examples.
We started off in part one talking about male Amazon
(01:23):
river dolphins which have been observed doing this amazing thing
where they pee on each other's faces using aerial streams
that project over the top of the water. Still an
open question as to why they do this, but the
leading explanation seems to be that it's some kind of
information sharing about fitness and competitive ability. We also talked
(01:44):
about why animals with urinary bladders usually have voluntary control
over urination, as opposed to it just kind of leaking
out whenever wherever, and we also got into a bit
about urination as a socially negotiated activity in human culture.
In the last episode, we talked about the vast, mysterious
world of scent marking in dogs, including all the different
(02:07):
kinds of information that we know dogs do share with
each other through urine, but also about how much there
is to this olfactory literary scene that we still don't understand.
One interesting question that came up in the context of
dogs was whether dogs can actually attempt to lie or
at least exaggerate with their urine marks, one study finding
(02:29):
evidence that smaller dogs may try to deceive other dogs
about their size by way of increasingly obtuse leg angles
when marking an elevated object. Then we also talked about
the fascinating example of lobster urine. The simplified version is
that lobsters pee out of their faces into other lobster's faces,
(02:50):
and these urine exchanges help lobsters navigate highly variable scenarios,
including courtship and mating, as well as competition and intimidation.
And we're back today to talk about more.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Yeah yeah, Returning first, I believe, to the waters and
discussing something we teased out a little bit in our
discussion of lobster.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
That's right, so yes. In the previous episode we talked
about urine based communication in crustaceans. I wanted to return
to the aquatic domain to mention pmail in fish. So here,
I wanted to get into a couple of things from
a paper called Aggressive Communication in Aquatic Environments. This was
published in the journal Functional Ecology in twenty twenty. The
(03:33):
author is Johim Frohman, and Frohman is a behavioral ecologist
at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. I got interested in
this guy's work because I saw him quoted in an
article in Scientific American which was covering the Amazon River dolphins,
talking about how other aquatic species can use urine for communication.
One example cited in that article had to do with
(03:56):
mating among stickleback fish. Apparently, female stickleback fish can get
information about male stickleback fish from their urine, but in
this case not just the kind of health, dominance, and
fitness information we've been mostly talking about so far. Instead,
the stickleback female is looking for information about the male's
(04:18):
immune system to see if the male's immune system and
tissue is compatible with her own. So anyway, I looked
up this paper in functional ecology. It is focused primarily
on aggressive communication, communication used to negotiate competition and fighting
among rivals that live in the water. Now, obviously, using
(04:41):
urine for information sharing works a little bit differently in
aquatic environments than it does on land. Now why would
that be? Well, for one thing in the water, Froeman
points out that you cannot place long lasting territorial scent marks.
So a daw will tag its physical environment with territorial
(05:03):
marks it peas on the world, and in doing so,
it fills the world with information about itself. And also
it smells the marks left by others in the same places.
So for the dog, you can consider space itself kind
of marked up with socially relevant metadata. It is a
urine based social augmented reality.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
That's a good way of putting it. Yeah, with all
of our augmented reality VR innovations that we're working on
Google Class and all of that, we're essentially trying to
create a world of dog p and the reading of
dog p for the human experience.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Yeah, it would be like if we could walk through
space and just find objects throughout the physical environment tagged
with the profiles of people who have touched them more
pen on them, I guess. So lots of other land
based mammals that we've talked about do this. You know,
last time we talked about the dwarf mongooses who leave
the anogen scent marks by doing handstands. But you can't
(06:04):
really do this kind of thing in the water because
you're in the water. Froman mentions a couple of reasons
for this. First of all, chemical cues tend to be
soluble in water, so the water will actually just wash
them away, diffuse them, and get rid of any local
marks that you leave pretty quickly. Beyond that, there is
(06:24):
a different microbial environment in the water. Fromen writes, quote
the ubiquitous bacteria in aquatic environments might rapidly degrade any
scent mark, So for aquatic species, it's just a lot
harder to associate a chemical mark with a physical location
across time. Chemical cues in the water tend to be
(06:46):
more temporary used for what Froman calls short term interactions,
and they will also more often be associated spatially with
your own physical body from which they emerge, rather than
than a fixed, separate place in the environment. So I
get the feeling that in the water there's gonna be
(07:07):
less of what you were talking about rob with this
sort of the werewolf character that can go into a
room and see the past in the room. Because of
all these sense associated with physical locations. In the water,
everything just kind of gets washed around. So I wonder
if in the water there may be a more Oh,
I don't know. Maybe you can get little tiny whiffs
(07:27):
of things that may have once been nearby, but they're
gonna be a lot less associated with physical places.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
That's a good point.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
So anyway, what are these short term interactions? They include
things like mate choice what Froeman calls social decisions, detecting
predatory threats and sharing information about those threats, with other conspecifics.
The best research on chemical communication underwater has been focused
on crustaceans, hence all the lobster research we talked about
(07:57):
last time. There's a bunch of similar work on crayfish
as well, and Frohman discusses a lot of the same
stuff we got into, for example, the finding that the
presence of aggressor urine during competition between lobsters and crayfish
can actually reduce fighting. Essentially, the information in the urine
better allows at least one of these crustaceans to figure
(08:20):
out that the fight is not in their interest. So,
in a way, you could think of actual physical fighting
in nature often being the result of confusion or ambiguity.
You know, it happens when the competitors don't have enough
information to figure out in advance who would probably win.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Yeah, this is something that you can certainly relate to
human gambling scenarios. In some cases, you could be talking
about actual gambling for money, or various games and little
card games and apps in which there is like the
gambling of some sort of unit but not actual that
doesn't have an actual monetary value, or at least verb
(09:00):
monetary value. There is often often comes down to a
question of should I fold or not, or should I
you know, up the ante, should I keep playing and
trying to evaluate do I have a shot at winning?
And you know, that's very much the same math that's
going on for these various organisms using the data that
(09:21):
is available to them, which might be available to them
in the form of urine.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
That's a good analogy. Yeah, So the sharing of the
urine could essentially be like the poker players just showing
each other their cards. You're like not keeping them hidden anymore,
so one player immediately knows I'm.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Just going to fold, yeah, Or there's always going to
be a certain amount of data on the table, right, yeah,
and that that is often going to be the main
data you're going to go on in a card game.
Now there's the added wrinkle, of course in a card game,
and that your opponent may want you to venture into
combat that you couldn't win in order to increase the
spoils of the game. Generally, it's not quite what you're
(09:58):
looking at when you're dealing with me competition in the wild.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Oh yeah, that'd be interesting to see if there are
examples of that in nature, where like the opponent would
want to keep, you know, getting you to up the
ante and bluff you along. But yeah, usually I think
even the stronger party would prefer to avoid a fight.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Anyway, So Froman here mentions a variable called resource holding
potential or RHP. You might see this referred to in
some papers like this. Basically, it's a variable that means
an individual animal's ability to win a fight. So urine
helps communicate your RHP, making the actual fight unnecessary. So
(10:40):
after talking about urine and RHP in crustaceans, Froman goes
on to talk about fish, saying similar uses of chemical
signals have been observed in several African cichlid species and
in some tilapia to establish RHP dominance without needing a fight.
But here we get to something interesting that came up
(11:02):
in the last episode. In part two, we talked about
some good reasons for thinking that dogs use urine based
signals to encode not only the kind of fixed feeling
information about individual identity, health and fitness, sex, and mating status,
(11:22):
but much more fleeting momentary things like psychological information. I
remember the example we talked about last time was that
domestic dogs have been found to detect biomarkers of stress
in human urine, and they seem to use that information.
They use it in cognition and learning. Still to be
(11:45):
determined to what extent, if any, dogs use that information
from scent markings urine markings about each other, but it
seems quite plausible that they do that. They're saying, oh,
not just this, this is Jeff the dog down the street,
and not just health status. Does it have parasites and
all that, but also like Jeff is stressed out or
(12:07):
Jeff is happy, and that might affect how the dog
that smells the pea behaves. We don't know for sure,
but it seems plausible that it does so to some extent.
This kind of I would say, makes sense to us
with dogs. It's fascinating, but it's not crazy, because we
already think of dogs as emotional animals with emotional inner lives.
(12:28):
Their feelings and motivation states are familiar and meaningful to us.
But it seems there are some likely equivalents to this
pea based emotion or at least motivation state sharing, even
among the colder and less snugly inhabitants of the water.
I think you could say that lobsters, as we talked
(12:49):
about last time, and even fish to some extent, pee
their feelings. Froeman mentions that quote in juvenile nile Telapia
or Oreochromis nylocticus, the exchange of chemical cues informs about
the sender's motivation and about individual identity, and then also
(13:11):
speaking about neolam prologus pulture from and writes quote in
this species, members of both sexes changed their urination patterns
during agonistic encounters agonistic meaning aggressive encounters. Competition quote blocking
olfactory contact between contestants led to an increase in fight
(13:32):
intensity and to a higher rate of overt aggressive attacks,
in line with what we've talked about before, but going
on quote, As larger individuals excreted larger amounts of urine,
chemical cues might be a reliable proxy of the opponent's
body size, which might be beneficial, especially under turbid conditions. Furthermore,
(13:52):
an aggression mediated increase in urination frequency was accompanied by
an increased amount of conjugated eleven keto testosterone in the water. Thus,
urine might not only transfer information about the contestants resource
holding potential, but also about the opponent's motivational state. So again,
(14:14):
something about what this the urine might communicate, something about
what is going on essentially in the brain, in the
nervous system of the other fish, what they want, what
they intend to do, which I guess it's debatable whether
you would call that motivational state an emotion, but I
think the case could be made. Emotions and motivational states
(14:37):
have significant overlap, at least in humans and in other animals.
We can think of.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, from the human standpoint, if there
is a standoff between two human beings, the broadcasting of
emotional state, be it an honest broadcast or an attempted deception,
is going to be an important part of that standoff.
You know, how mean they looking, how cool are they looking,
(15:03):
and so forth.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
And of course this squares with what you were talking
about last time, Rob with the lobster urine. In competition
between aggressive lobsters, the urine shares state information about, for example,
prior victory or defeat in these agonistic encounters. Sounds a
lot like Again, people might people might quibble with the
(15:25):
use of the word emotion, but that feels something like
emotion to me, like feeling victorious or feeling defeated.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Yeah, like like I believe one of the papers was
I was talking about there being a lot of serotonin
in the urine of a victorious lobster. You know, it's
it's that an emotional stay. Maybe not, but it's saying
something about like where that that creature's physiology is following
a specific victory.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
So I don't know when we started doing this series
about about urine based communication, I don't think I realized
we would come up with so many examples where it
looked like the urine was not only sharing just the
more relatively fix I mean, I guess nothing biological is
really fixed, but the more stable sort of biological health
(16:13):
information not just that, but sharing something like psychological information,
sharing something the urine says something about what's going on
in your nervous system and in your brain, which we
may call emotions or we may call intentions or motivations.
That's being communicated through urine as well. And to me,
(16:34):
that makes it a lot more like what we think
of with language. I mean, we've made these distinctions before
about the differences between what you can say with urine
versus what you can say with language. Obviously, language is
going to be much much more versatile because you can intentionally,
voluntarily craft an infinite number of different kinds of messages,
(16:55):
truthful or deceptive, and urine may not have that level
of versatility, but it can communicate not just these sort
of stable facts about the body, but can communicate this
fleeting information about the mind and if you want to
get touchy feely the soul. I guess that just causes
(17:15):
me to think about P based communication as something with
more potential for kind of meaning and complexity. You know
that it carries potentially emotional information, that it lends itself
more to the idea that there could be P based literature.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Yeah, yeah, I think yeah. By and large, all this
information we're looking at does drive home the fact that
humans just don't We don't speak urine for the most part.
We have a very blunt understanding of what urine is
and what it can convey, and it's just a much
richer experience for other animals, to the point that it's
(17:52):
not really urine for them anymore, not in the human sense,
Like our language for urine is kind of inadequate to
truly describe what it is for various other species. Now
(18:13):
I want to bring things back to the mammal world
here to the surface world, in particular, to talk about
the flemen response. This may have been on some of
your minds as we were talking about this topic in
earlier episodes, because in evaluating the urine communication of another,
it may prove necessary to assume the fleming response, as
(18:36):
it was dubbed by German zoologist Karl max Schneider in
the nineteen thirties, but the expression itself had been known
to naturalists since at least the eighteenth century. The term
flemen apparently comes from upper saxon German, where it means
to curl the upper lip and or to look spiteful.
It's not just for smelling urine, but that's certainly one
(18:57):
of the odorous bouquets that it picks upon.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
So the word am I understanding in the human context
originally refers to an expression like a sneer the curled lip.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Yeah, a sneer that you know, honestly, I don't know
that you see, or I don't know, I feel like
you don't see. People make this face a lot, and
we'll come back to one of the reasons why. But
in general, like how often do you see someone do
like a spiteful sneer in which they expose their upper teeth.
Like the main example I was finding. I found a
(19:31):
couple of articles that had a picture of Harrison Ford
doing the face, you know, maybe accidentally in the midst
of talking or something. But for the most part, the
main thing I was reminded of is the snarl that
Bela Lugosi gives in some of the in some one
particular scene, but also some production stills for the nineteen
thirties Dracula.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Oh okay, you attached a picture in the outline, and
I can see that he he almost looks not quite
human here. It looks a bit like a like a
big cat.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's key because we do see
this in cats. We see it in big cats, and
we see it in house cats, and in the world
of house cats it is sometimes informally referred to as
the stinky kitty face.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
I didn't know about that.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Yeah, it's one of these things where you know, as
a cat owner it's going to obviously things are going
to vary depending on the exact nature and personality of
your cat, but it's something you'll pick up on them
doing from time to time, they might be checking out
something that you would associate with a smell, like, I
don't know, a spot on the couch or a pair
of shoes, that sort of thing. It might also just
(20:41):
be a little less clear what they are responding to,
but generally the idea is that they are assuming this
kind of a sneer that also looks a little bit goofy,
and what they are doing is they are heightening their
exposure to the odor so as to better analyze it. Interesting, So,
(21:02):
in general, across various animals, you're going to see this
generally entailing a curling back of the upper lip, exposure
of the top teeth, and breathing. And then they're going
to breathe in slowly through the mouth alone. And this
is all about allowing better access of smells and pheromones
to the specialized vomber nasal organ, the vn O or
(21:23):
the Jacobsen's organ. This is a chemoreception organ in the
roof of the mouth. This occurs in ungulates as well,
horses and giraftes, which both smell and in the latter
example of the diraffe's they also taste the urine of
mares that are in estrus.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Huh okay, well wait a minute. That makes me wonder
if all these other mammals have a vombar nasal organ
do we have one? Can we? Can we smell with
the roof of our mouth like this?
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Humans do not, so far as anyone can apparently tell,
have one of these, at least not a functional one.
Is a According to twenty fourteen's Encyclopedia of the Neurological Sciences,
second edition by Moon, at all vomor on nasal organs
are prominent in the fetus and show up vestigially in adults.
Though there has apparently been a lot of back and
(22:16):
forth debate over this, it seems like the majority of view, though,
is that while some primates have functional vomiting and nasal organs,
mainly like New World monkeys, chimps, and humans do not.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
I'd also point out something that I saw referenced in
an article is that the obviousness of the fleming response
to humans in another organism, like how pronounced the fleming
response is, doesn't necessarily correlate to how strong their ability
to sense things happens to be, which I guess is
(22:51):
kind of a no brainer. When you're driving home like that.
But you know, some fleming responses are really wild, like
included a photo here of a horse's women response where
they just look like matt demons, whereas certainly a housecat's
flimen response just looks a little bit funny. You know.
But our interpretation of it doesn't actually necessarily give us
(23:14):
any clues into how strong their ability to sense things
happens to be. But we again, we certainly see it
again in ungulates and dogs and cats and other mammals.
I've even seen articles looking at the fleming response in
things like sea otters and elephants. So it's all over
the place.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
That's interesting. I'm going to be on the lookout for
it now.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Yeah, if you spend any time with cats, you will
see the stinky kitty face from time to time. And yeah,
it's just a sign that there's some sort of smell
going on. Don't take it personally. It doesn't mean it's
you or something in your environment. They might just but
something has occurred or they've noticed something that requires just
a little more in depth analysis.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Well, I would like to transition to something else, but
we're gonna stick with mammals at least for the moment,
so I want to mention an interesting paper I came
across about social urination in mammals, which may or may
not turn out to be communicative in nature. This paper
was by ana Onishi, James Brooks, Sota Inoe, and Shinya Yamamoto,
(24:16):
published in Current Biology in twenty twenty five this year,
and it's called socially contagious urination in Chimpanzees, So I
hope that title's got your interest piqued. The authors here
are affiliated with a few different institutions in Japan, such
as Kyoto University. I was also reading an article about
(24:37):
this paper in Scientific American that I wanted to flag.
This was by Megan Bartel's from January twenty twenty five,
so apparently the lead author on this paper, ana Onishi,
was inspired in part by the fact that humans often
seemed to treat urination as a social behavior. This kind
(24:58):
of came up in our first episode of the series.
Despite the fact that we often think of urination as
a solitary activity, an activity where we seek at least
a visual isolation for the sake of modesty, in reality,
people often do treat urination or trips to the bathroom
as social occasions. So think about it like this. You
(25:20):
are out somewhere and a restaurant or a concert, public event,
and somebody from the group you're with says they're going
to go to the bathroom, and then somebody else says, oh,
wait up, I'll go with you, and then somebody else
says me too. Hey, it is actually a socially organized
social trip to the bathroom. People are urinating as a group.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
You know, I hadn't thought about this as much until
you mentioned it. But you could also factor our social
technology into this equation and say, well, what even if
you go to the bathroom by yourself during one of
these situations, there's a very strong possibility you are going
to check your phone, and in doing so, you are
going to engage in some alternate online socialization whilst going
(26:05):
to the bathroom. I don't know to what extent we
should factor that into all of this, but maybe you
could make a case or even solitary urination is social
given the right technology.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Socially coordinated, synchronized trips to urinate are actually very common.
And this is not just part of American culture where
I'm familiar with it. The author of this scientific American
article actually mentions there is a word in Japanese. It
is sura sean t s u r E s h
o n, which refers to the phenomenon where people get
(26:39):
up and go to the bathroom as a group.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
That would be interesting to get into. It makes me
think of the various kai traditions that involve the potential threats,
or at least that the very scary things that it
can occur when you go to a dark bathroom at
night by yourself. Yeah. I can't help but wonder to
what extent these two things might be connected culturally.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
Yeah, the bathroom stall ghosts. Yeah. And there are other
examples of biological activities that seem to be socially contagious.
One example is yawning, and I think we've all experienced this.
Somebody else yawns, you see them yawn and then you
yawn yourself, or maybe even inter species contagious yawning. You
(27:22):
yawn and then your dog yawns, or vice versa. A
very interesting question about why seeing somebody else yawn makes
you more likely to yawn. Maybe we could come back
to that in the future, if we haven't done a
whole episode on that before.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Have.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
We actually don't remember.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
I don't think we have. Yawning. Yeah, that would be
a good one, you know, if only to generate the
responses that. I can't believe they did an episode on yawning.
So boring. No, it's probably pretty exciting.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Also, scratching, Hey, that's exciting. What's more exciting than the scratching?
Scratching is contagious as well, socially contagious. Scratching. You see
somebody scratch, you're more likely to scratch.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Yeah, scratching could be Yeah, it could easily be its
own episode as well. That one gets pretty intense anyway.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
So, while observing chimpanzees as a doctoral researcher at the
Kyoto University Wildlife Research Center, the lead author of this paper,
Onishi thought she observed a similar pattern of socially contagious
urination among the chimpanzees, so she staged a quantitative experiment
(28:27):
to measure whether this was really the case. The way
it worked is researchers studied a group of twenty chimpanzees
living in captivity at a place called Kumamoto Sanctuary in Japan,
and they filmed them and reviewed more than six hundred
hours of footage to meticulously track exactly when each ape urinated,
(28:49):
where it was at the time, and who was nearby.
Then they created a computer simulation of randomized chimpanzee urination
to compare the actual results to and the analysis revealed
that chimpanzees were not just peeing randomly, there actually was
social correlation. On average, an ape was significantly more likely
(29:11):
to pee if another ape had just peed within the
past sixty seconds, and especially if that ape was very
close by within ten feet so up ip. Another interesting
factor beyond time and proximity was social rank. The researchers
looked into whether the identity and social rank of each
(29:34):
urinate or mattered in how much how much influence there
was from one ap peeing to another ap peeing, and
the identities did matter. So they initially looked to see
whether the ape equivalent of social friendship was an influence,
and it seems the answer there was no, but social
(29:54):
rank was an influence. As quoted in Scientific American Onniche
said quote, I initially expected that if social influences existed,
they might resemble those seen in yawning, such as stronger
contagion between socially close pairs that in itself is an
interesting thing about yawning that, like social social closeness makes
(30:16):
the yawn more contagious. But that is not what they found,
continuing the quote from oneishi. Instead, we observed a clear
influence of social rank, with lower ranking individuals being more
likely to follow the urination of others. So if you
are a lower ranking chimpanzee in the group, it might
(30:37):
be more like the boss PE's ip, or maybe you
know the cooler person ps ip. Now some caveats here.
Obviously this was done in captive chimpanzees, and when a
behavior is observed in captive animals, it's always worth asking
whether the same behavior is seen in the wild. Some
(30:57):
strange traits emerge in zoos or labs or sanctuaries that
are not seen in wild conspecifics. The researchers here believe
for a number of reasons that this probably is also
true in the wild, but that's worth investigating on its
own and follow up research. But finally we come to
the question of would this contagious urination count as communication.
(31:19):
If one ape is getting a signal from another ape
to do something, I think that is communication. Though It's
funny because here it's not, as far as we know,
anything like the smell of my urine will now give
you updated information about my health that you can use
in determining how to act. Instead, it's more like the
fact that I am peeing informs you that it is
(31:41):
also time for you to pee. Now, what is the
value of that? Why would it be biologically useful for
one ape to signal to another that it's time to pee.
It's possible that it could have some role in maintaining
general social cohesion in a way that's hard for us
to understand. So like, when you think about it, a
(32:02):
lot of synchronized group bonding behaviors among humans would be
really hard to explain the exact biological utility of except
to say that we just know because we are humans
and we know how we feel when we do them.
We can say that doing these things together at the
same time makes us feel more bonded and helps motivate
(32:24):
us to cooperate with each other in other domains. So
there is clearly some synchronized activities just contribute to social
cohesion and bonding. Not always easy to say why, but
they do.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Yeah, yeah, I mean this way, you're not splitting the
party every time, every time this random individual wants to
pay or needs to pay.
Speaker 3 (32:44):
Beyond establishing and maintaining social cohesion, there are a few
other ideas the authors mention. One idea is that coordinated
urination may play, to quote the paper quote, potential roles
in preparation for collective departure, i e. Avoiding before long
distance travel. So you know, parents may be familiar with this, Like,
(33:06):
you know, we're about to go on a car trip.
You need to go to the bathroom before we leave.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Yeah, yeah, this is a This is a big one.
This is a This is a frequent point of discussion
in my household.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
And even apart from long distance travel. One researcher quoted
in the Scientific American article just pointed out the idea
of a daily routine among chimpanzees. So at different times
throughout the day, chimpanzees will often get up and relocate
to a different place. These relocations as a group are
generally controlled by higher ranking chimpanzees in the group, the
(33:40):
group leaders. So it could be that the group leader pees,
signaling I am about to initiate a relocation. It is
time for the bathroom break before we move, and then
the others notice that the leader is peeing, and they
follow suit because they know they're about to relocate. Another
possible explanation that means the authors mentioned could be quote
(34:02):
territorial scent marking i e. Coordination of chemosensory signals. So
what's better than you individually doing a territorial scent mark
with your pe getting all your buds to mark at
the same time. One can imagine that this does a
number of things. It increases detectability allah where we were
talking about elevated scent marking and dogs, It's important to
(34:24):
make your scent markings in the environment more detectable. But
also you can think about the amount of information presented
with a whole group peeing together instead of just one,
you know, peeing individually, and maybe also more individuals peeing
would communicate more of a threat level within the collective mark.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Yeah. Depending on sensitivity to these markers, you might think, Okay, well,
this is either a whole bunch of chimps and not
just one individual, or if it is one individual, it's
one huge chimp. I gets there's no messing with this guy.
This is not potential prey or some chimp that I
can possibly best and about just best to keep my distance.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
So anyway, chimpanzee p based communication. They pee to communicate
about peeing for the purpose of peeing. That's fascinating and
maybe for other purposes as well. But yeah, I thought
that was good.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
All right. As we round out this episode, I want
to come back to a topic that I've teased out
a couple of times in the previous episodes, and that
is the idea that even if humans cannot speak urine
as well as other creatures, and certainly can't read urine
as well as other creatures, we do have the advantage
(35:50):
of having technology. And this is where we get into
the field of your analysis. Your analysis, via lab work,
automated systems, and now even artificial intelligence, can reveal quite
a lot about a person. Your analysis is used to
detect and manage a wide range of disorders, to check
overall health, to look for particular conditions, and or to
(36:13):
manage known conditions. Some very general prognosis can be made
visually with a human urine sample if you know what
you're doing. But much in your analysis is revealed via
lab work and via machines and technology. Yeah, uh, that's
not going to become as a shocker to many of you.
We've all had to give urine samples that the doctor
(36:36):
before uh, and they've given us the lab read out
and or we've you know, we've paid for that that
uh that that lab v on top of our visit.
It's worth pointing out, by the way, technically urine does
contain DNA, but DNA deteriorates quickly in human urine and
is not the best source of DNA for say, forensic
(36:57):
analysis and so forth.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
I don't know this is the reason, but I would
imagine there are other chemicals in the urine that probably
attack the DNA and break it down.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Yeah, that's my understanding. Yeah, so you know, things like
certainly blood saliva, these are far better sources for DNA. So, like,
if you were dealing with like a hardcore like TV
forensics example, I guess there might be a scenario, and
there may be scenarios where some sort of a like
like usable DNA information is obtainable via urine sample, but
(37:30):
for the most part, like it's considered like not a
great source of DNA. Now, in the last episode, we
did mention in passing the idea of using someone else's
urine as a way to dupe a drug test, a
urinary drug test. This is indeed a well known aspect
of human urine evaluation. Everyone's familiar with this an eve.
(37:51):
If you haven't been had your urine tested for work
or some sort of legal process in the past, you've
probably seen it on I believe there's a famous episode
of The Office that I only vaguely remember, but I
know I've seen it that involves like drug testing of
the Office because what Dwight found half a joint in
the parking lot.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Oh do they have to pee for that? I don't remember.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
Yeah, I was trying to refresh on this. I think
like Michael Scott, the boss on The Office, ends up
getting paranoid because he once quote got high accidentally at
an Alicia Keys concert, and so he's he's like trying
to pressure Dwight into giving him some clean urine that
he use.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Yeah, but though it has played for jokes here, I mean,
I guess, I guess p fraud is a real thing
in the world because some people are going to want
to avoid avoid the implications of a drug test.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
That's right. And while we did mention the idea of
using someone else's urine, as occurs in this episode of
the Office or there there's the attempt to do this,
and I've seen this particular plot point come up in
other shows as well. We didn't mention another option that
has certainly entered the market over the past many years,
and that is the use of synthetic human urine. This
(39:01):
is indeed apparently a product you can get that at
least claims. You know, I'm not going to get into
certainly into individual brands or claims made by these brands,
but you can go to places and you can buy
something that claims to be synthetic human urine for the
express purpose of duping a urinary drug test.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
Now this may be new to many of you, but
to be clear, we've actually had synthetic human urine for
a very long time. I was reading about this at
on the website Maoclinic Proceedings dot org and they point
out that German chemist Frederick Wohler, who lived eighteen hundred
to eighteen eighty two, was the first to produce synthetic urine,
(39:41):
synthetic human urine back in eighteen twenty eight.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Well, the date on that discovery makes me think that
that was not intended to fool a drug test, so
there must be uses for it beyond beyond just the
p fraud.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
Absolutely, Yeah, this was not for a drug test welder.
It was a was a prolific and highly influential chemist.
We may have brought him up on the show before.
I feel like there's a strong possibility and the main
tangible benefit of the at the time for the creation
of synthetic human urine was for testing of medical equipment,
and this is something it's still used for today. In fact,
(40:17):
you can easily you can go online. You can find
like medical grade companies that sell synthetic human urine and
it will often be calibrated for very specific testing purposes,
like you want to test this kind of medical equipment
and you need synthetic urine to do so, Well, here's
the right kind of urine for that test, okay. And
(40:37):
so that was kind of like the broad call for
synthetic urine at the time, but there was this There's
an entire additional layer to Frederick go Oulder's contribution here
as well. So his synthesis of human urea without the
aid of a human kidney proved that organic compounds could
(40:58):
be synthesized without the aid of the quote unquote vital
force found in a living organism, getting here into the
vital force theory or vitalism, which on the whole argue
that you could not reduce life to a mechanistic or
certainly a chemical explanation, like you couldn't just create something
that a human or animal body made, because there is
(41:22):
something beyond our science in that body that is making
the substance in question.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
Oh okay, So while I think you could still argue
today that there might be something in the more ambiguous
term life that is not quite captured in reproducible chemical experiments,
basically all of the processes within the body could be
recreated in the lab.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Yeah, and I think getting back into our own blunted
human understanding of urine, most people today certainly are not
going to hear this and think, well, that's blasphemous. You
can't synthesize human urine. Human urine is holy and it
is made only by a human body. Like nobody's really
probably feeling that because we don't think about urine as
having any intrinsic value. It is just waste product that
(42:06):
on the whole we prefer not to produce. It just
kind of gets in the way. Of course, as we've
been discussing dogs, lobsters, so many other animals if they
could express, if they could, you know, express feelings about urine,
would disagree with us and they might say no. A
dog might say no, urine is holy, Urine is information,
(42:27):
and it comes from a dog, or it comes from
some other animal. And that is what I'm reading. And
the idea that you could fake that is just you know,
abysmal p.
Speaker 3 (42:38):
Is vitalistic poetry. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Yeah, So at the time this was actually a big
deal though, because even though it was quote unquote just
urine that was synthesized, it paved the way for so
many world changing advancements in organic chemistry. So again coming
back to today, Yes, you can buy synthetic urine in
various places, either or legitimate medical testing purposes, educational purposes,
(43:04):
but also products that seem to be intended just for
the duping of drug tests.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
I haven't looked these up. How are they marketed? Do
they just say like, fool a drug test on them,
or do they have euphemistic language.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
I'm not going to mention any products by name, but
some of them have like expectedly kind of goofy product
names like, you can definitely, or it seems to me,
you can definitely tell the difference between a product that
is marketed for clinical usage versus things that are marketed
for the duping of drug drug tests. I think it's
(43:38):
pretty obvious. But these products, if I'm understanding this correctly,
and maybe the literature is a little incomplete on when
things like this start popping up, but I believe we've
had products like this on the market of some sort
since like the late nineties, so they've been around for
a while. I had not heard of them, so I
thought this was maybe like a very new thing, But yeah,
(44:00):
these products have been around. Some of them are banned
in certain areas, certain states, for example now because of
their usage to try and you doup at drug test. Now,
synthetic urine in general, the varieties aimed at drug tests
but also clinically, they've grown quite advanced, and of course
this has led to advancements in drug testing. So I
(44:24):
was reading some sources here that we're talking about how
drug tests have had to look for new markers in
synthetic urines that can then be targeted on a drug
test so that they can figure out like, Okay, well
this is obvious urine looks clean, but it's also obviously purchased,
you know, at the local smoke shop.
Speaker 3 (44:45):
This is the evolutionary arms race in the synthetic urine
and the drug tests.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
Yeah, and of course you can't help but imagine what
would a dog think of all this? Like they would
probably like it would be like, you know, because there's
probably a similar discussion to be made around say, AI
generated literature, you know, where you know, someone might say, well,
how could you possibly be fooled by this? Like clearly
was written by a machine and so forth, Like the
dogs probably have a very low would have a very
(45:14):
uh like low estimation of synthetic urines and like what
it's telling them. Though, I guess that's that's a whole
topic under unto itself that we're not really going to
get into today into today, like to what degree does
synthetic urine fool animals that have these heightened senses to
understand it?
Speaker 3 (45:31):
Or I wonder would the dog really have the the
concept of authenticity when reading the urine or would it
just be like, huh, this is from a strange type
of creature I've never encountered before that's.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Right, it would might maybe be more like, this is
a this is a weird communication that I'm reading, This
is a very strange dog. More information is required. I
probably need to see this dog in person now to
be clear. Outside of the market for synthetic human urine,
there is also a market for synthetic and animal urines.
Speaker 3 (46:02):
Wait a minute for could this be for scent marking
fraud essentially carried out by humans?
Speaker 1 (46:08):
Yeah? Yeah, in instances where there is some sort of
a human interest involved in some sort of communication fraud
with animal urine. One example of this that you can
find pretty readily, say online is synthetic deer urine. And
this is apparently a product that exists because you have
(46:30):
in the past used actual deer urine to say, you know,
bait a buck, that sort of a thing. But there
are a number of states that have banned the use
of actual deer urine to help prevent the spread of
chronic wasting disease and deer ah. Okay, yeah, Because to
come back to urine in general, like urine, healthy human urine,
(46:52):
for example, is generally thought to be largely sterile. But yes,
there are various things that can be various contaminants, various
illnesses that can be contracted through unhealthy urine.
Speaker 3 (47:05):
So this would be using animal urine fraud for the
purpose of an attractant by hunters. But I've read about
animal urine fraud being used for the opposite purpose to
deter animals by using a predator urine. So you you
synthesize there's not really a cougar in the area, but
you put cougar pee out there, and it supposedly it
(47:26):
will keep away the pest animals that you don't want
in your garden or whatever.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Exactly, yes, And that is the other major synthetic urine
product that you see. And this is another case though,
where there are products that at least claim to use
actual urine from say fox or a bear, or you know,
whatever the predator happens to be, and then there are
cases where they're making a point of it being synthetic
(47:51):
animal urine. I can't speak to the to how efficient
these are, but you know, coming back to our dog example,
if they are a fish enough to raise the specter
of a potential predator being present, then perhaps it is
useful enough. We talked about chimpanzees. I want to mention
that for medical purposes, you can also buy synthetic chimpanzee urine.
(48:16):
I included a link here for you, Joe. If you
look around for it, you can find it. There's one
company in particular that has a website and they have
various forms of synthetic human urine that is to be
clear intended for clinical purposes and the testing of like
medical equipment and tests, and educational purposes as well. But
you can also buy synthetic chimpanzee urine for the same purpose, because,
(48:40):
of course the study of chimpanzee physiology and chimpanzee biological
responses is vitally important for human medicine as well.
Speaker 3 (48:49):
But is it cheaper than the synthetic human urine, And
if so, with somebody trying to pass the drug tests,
save a few bucks and get the chimpanzee urine instead.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
Well, let's check real quick. I'll pull up the website. Okay,
I'm looking at the costs for simulated monkey urine. Okay,
all right, okay, and then let's see. You know, it
looks about like it's the same price for humans, so
there's no there's no need to go cheaper for chimp urine.
I have a feeling chimp urine would not work. I
(49:19):
feel like they would catch you if you try to
use chimp urine to synthetic chimp urine to pass a
like a work drug test. But also I should add
that you're probably I'm thinking most of the people trying
to pass a drug test using the synthetic urine, they're
probably not buying it from a biomedical company. They're buying
it a like at the local smoke shop or something
(49:40):
from some other supplier, which I'm assuming are you know,
ultimately not the same corporation.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
Listeners, if anybody in the audience has ever tried to
spoof a drug test by using like cougar urine or something,
let us know how that went. Did it work?
Speaker 1 (49:57):
Yeah? Or in general, if there are people out there
who have exp using synthetic animal urines either to attract
or drive away organisms, write in with your experiences with
these products. You know, we're not going to mention specific products,
you know, obviously, but in general, I'd love to hear
how this has worked, Like maybe get an idea of
like the where the science is in terms of making
(50:20):
synthetic urine that can not only be useful for biomedical
purposes and testing equipment in the human world, but potentially
in communicating with other animals, even in a very blunt manner.
Speaker 3 (50:32):
Yeah. Oh, and hey, we also we know we've got
a lot of scientists in the audience. If you use
synthetic urine in your research, let us know how what
do you use it for?
Speaker 1 (50:40):
Yeah? Absolutely, all right, on that note, we're going to
go and close up this episode, but yeah, right in,
we'd love to hear from everyone, Just to remind that
The Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science
and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays
and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to
just talk about a weird film on weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (50:57):
Huge things, as always to our excellent to your 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 that Stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
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, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. Again, we are on vacation this week,
so you've got femail, Part three of three airing right now.
Originally published five two, twenty twenty five. What more could
you possibly want new episodes? Well, we'll have this for
you next week. Hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part three in our series on urine based communication in
the animal Kingdom. Humans, of course have the gift of language,
which is a wonderful multimodal information sharing tool of infinite versatility,
and the fact that we possess the capacity for complex lange,
(01:00):
which is maybe the most unique and amazing thing about
us as a species. But one mode of communication that
we don't really use, but which is quite popular throughout
the animal kingdom is communication through urine. So in the
last couple of episodes we discussed a whole bunch of examples.
We started off in part one talking about male Amazon
(01:23):
river dolphins which have been observed doing this amazing thing
where they pee on each other's faces using aerial streams
that project over the top of the water. Still an
open question as to why they do this, but the
leading explanation seems to be that it's some kind of
information sharing about fitness and competitive ability. We also talked
(01:44):
about why animals with urinary bladders usually have voluntary control
over urination, as opposed to it just kind of leaking
out whenever wherever, and we also got into a bit
about urination as a socially negotiated activity in human culture.
In the last episode, we talked about the vast, mysterious
world of scent marking in dogs, including all the different
(02:07):
kinds of information that we know dogs do share with
each other through urine, but also about how much there
is to this olfactory literary scene that we still don't understand.
One interesting question that came up in the context of
dogs was whether dogs can actually attempt to lie or
at least exaggerate with their urine marks, one study finding
(02:29):
evidence that smaller dogs may try to deceive other dogs
about their size by way of increasingly obtuse leg angles
when marking an elevated object. Then we also talked about
the fascinating example of lobster urine. The simplified version is
that lobsters pee out of their faces into other lobster's faces,
(02:50):
and these urine exchanges help lobsters navigate highly variable scenarios,
including courtship and mating, as well as competition and intimidation.
And we're back today to talk about more.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Yeah yeah, Returning first, I believe, to the waters and
discussing something we teased out a little bit in our
discussion of lobster.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
That's right, so yes. In the previous episode we talked
about urine based communication in crustaceans. I wanted to return
to the aquatic domain to mention pmail in fish. So here,
I wanted to get into a couple of things from
a paper called Aggressive Communication in Aquatic Environments. This was
published in the journal Functional Ecology in twenty twenty. The
(03:33):
author is Johim Frohman, and Frohman is a behavioral ecologist
at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. I got interested in
this guy's work because I saw him quoted in an
article in Scientific American which was covering the Amazon River dolphins,
talking about how other aquatic species can use urine for communication.
One example cited in that article had to do with
(03:56):
mating among stickleback fish. Apparently, female stickleback fish can get
information about male stickleback fish from their urine, but in
this case not just the kind of health, dominance, and
fitness information we've been mostly talking about so far. Instead,
the stickleback female is looking for information about the male's
(04:18):
immune system to see if the male's immune system and
tissue is compatible with her own. So anyway, I looked
up this paper in functional ecology. It is focused primarily
on aggressive communication, communication used to negotiate competition and fighting
among rivals that live in the water. Now, obviously, using
(04:41):
urine for information sharing works a little bit differently in
aquatic environments than it does on land. Now why would
that be? Well, for one thing in the water, Froeman
points out that you cannot place long lasting territorial scent marks.
So a daw will tag its physical environment with territorial
(05:03):
marks it peas on the world, and in doing so,
it fills the world with information about itself. And also
it smells the marks left by others in the same places.
So for the dog, you can consider space itself kind
of marked up with socially relevant metadata. It is a
urine based social augmented reality.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
That's a good way of putting it. Yeah, with all
of our augmented reality VR innovations that we're working on
Google Class and all of that, we're essentially trying to
create a world of dog p and the reading of
dog p for the human experience.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Yeah, it would be like if we could walk through
space and just find objects throughout the physical environment tagged
with the profiles of people who have touched them more
pen on them, I guess. So lots of other land
based mammals that we've talked about do this. You know,
last time we talked about the dwarf mongooses who leave
the anogen scent marks by doing handstands. But you can't
(06:04):
really do this kind of thing in the water because
you're in the water. Froman mentions a couple of reasons
for this. First of all, chemical cues tend to be
soluble in water, so the water will actually just wash
them away, diffuse them, and get rid of any local
marks that you leave pretty quickly. Beyond that, there is
(06:24):
a different microbial environment in the water. Fromen writes, quote
the ubiquitous bacteria in aquatic environments might rapidly degrade any
scent mark, So for aquatic species, it's just a lot
harder to associate a chemical mark with a physical location
across time. Chemical cues in the water tend to be
(06:46):
more temporary used for what Froman calls short term interactions,
and they will also more often be associated spatially with
your own physical body from which they emerge, rather than
than a fixed, separate place in the environment. So I
get the feeling that in the water there's gonna be
(07:07):
less of what you were talking about rob with this
sort of the werewolf character that can go into a
room and see the past in the room. Because of
all these sense associated with physical locations. In the water,
everything just kind of gets washed around. So I wonder
if in the water there may be a more Oh,
I don't know. Maybe you can get little tiny whiffs
(07:27):
of things that may have once been nearby, but they're
gonna be a lot less associated with physical places.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
That's a good point.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
So anyway, what are these short term interactions? They include
things like mate choice what Froeman calls social decisions, detecting
predatory threats and sharing information about those threats, with other conspecifics.
The best research on chemical communication underwater has been focused
on crustaceans, hence all the lobster research we talked about
(07:57):
last time. There's a bunch of similar work on crayfish
as well, and Frohman discusses a lot of the same
stuff we got into, for example, the finding that the
presence of aggressor urine during competition between lobsters and crayfish
can actually reduce fighting. Essentially, the information in the urine
better allows at least one of these crustaceans to figure
(08:20):
out that the fight is not in their interest. So,
in a way, you could think of actual physical fighting
in nature often being the result of confusion or ambiguity.
You know, it happens when the competitors don't have enough
information to figure out in advance who would probably win.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Yeah, this is something that you can certainly relate to
human gambling scenarios. In some cases, you could be talking
about actual gambling for money, or various games and little
card games and apps in which there is like the
gambling of some sort of unit but not actual that
doesn't have an actual monetary value, or at least verb
(09:00):
monetary value. There is often often comes down to a
question of should I fold or not, or should I
you know, up the ante, should I keep playing and
trying to evaluate do I have a shot at winning?
And you know, that's very much the same math that's
going on for these various organisms using the data that
(09:21):
is available to them, which might be available to them
in the form of urine.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
That's a good analogy. Yeah, So the sharing of the
urine could essentially be like the poker players just showing
each other their cards. You're like not keeping them hidden anymore,
so one player immediately knows I'm.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Just going to fold, yeah, Or there's always going to
be a certain amount of data on the table, right, yeah,
and that that is often going to be the main
data you're going to go on in a card game.
Now there's the added wrinkle, of course in a card game,
and that your opponent may want you to venture into
combat that you couldn't win in order to increase the
spoils of the game. Generally, it's not quite what you're
(09:58):
looking at when you're dealing with me competition in the wild.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Oh yeah, that'd be interesting to see if there are
examples of that in nature, where like the opponent would
want to keep, you know, getting you to up the
ante and bluff you along. But yeah, usually I think
even the stronger party would prefer to avoid a fight.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Anyway, So Froman here mentions a variable called resource holding
potential or RHP. You might see this referred to in
some papers like this. Basically, it's a variable that means
an individual animal's ability to win a fight. So urine
helps communicate your RHP, making the actual fight unnecessary. So
(10:40):
after talking about urine and RHP in crustaceans, Froman goes
on to talk about fish, saying similar uses of chemical
signals have been observed in several African cichlid species and
in some tilapia to establish RHP dominance without needing a fight.
But here we get to something interesting that came up
(11:02):
in the last episode. In part two, we talked about
some good reasons for thinking that dogs use urine based
signals to encode not only the kind of fixed feeling
information about individual identity, health and fitness, sex, and mating status,
(11:22):
but much more fleeting momentary things like psychological information. I
remember the example we talked about last time was that
domestic dogs have been found to detect biomarkers of stress
in human urine, and they seem to use that information.
They use it in cognition and learning. Still to be
(11:45):
determined to what extent, if any, dogs use that information
from scent markings urine markings about each other, but it
seems quite plausible that they do that. They're saying, oh,
not just this, this is Jeff the dog down the street,
and not just health status. Does it have parasites and
all that, but also like Jeff is stressed out or
(12:07):
Jeff is happy, and that might affect how the dog
that smells the pea behaves. We don't know for sure,
but it seems plausible that it does so to some extent.
This kind of I would say, makes sense to us
with dogs. It's fascinating, but it's not crazy, because we
already think of dogs as emotional animals with emotional inner lives.
(12:28):
Their feelings and motivation states are familiar and meaningful to us.
But it seems there are some likely equivalents to this
pea based emotion or at least motivation state sharing, even
among the colder and less snugly inhabitants of the water.
I think you could say that lobsters, as we talked
(12:49):
about last time, and even fish to some extent, pee
their feelings. Froeman mentions that quote in juvenile nile Telapia
or Oreochromis nylocticus, the exchange of chemical cues informs about
the sender's motivation and about individual identity, and then also
(13:11):
speaking about neolam prologus pulture from and writes quote in
this species, members of both sexes changed their urination patterns
during agonistic encounters agonistic meaning aggressive encounters. Competition quote blocking
olfactory contact between contestants led to an increase in fight
(13:32):
intensity and to a higher rate of overt aggressive attacks,
in line with what we've talked about before, but going
on quote, As larger individuals excreted larger amounts of urine,
chemical cues might be a reliable proxy of the opponent's
body size, which might be beneficial, especially under turbid conditions. Furthermore,
(13:52):
an aggression mediated increase in urination frequency was accompanied by
an increased amount of conjugated eleven keto testosterone in the water. Thus,
urine might not only transfer information about the contestants resource
holding potential, but also about the opponent's motivational state. So again,
(14:14):
something about what this the urine might communicate, something about
what is going on essentially in the brain, in the
nervous system of the other fish, what they want, what
they intend to do, which I guess it's debatable whether
you would call that motivational state an emotion, but I
think the case could be made. Emotions and motivational states
(14:37):
have significant overlap, at least in humans and in other animals.
We can think of.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, from the human standpoint, if there
is a standoff between two human beings, the broadcasting of
emotional state, be it an honest broadcast or an attempted deception,
is going to be an important part of that standoff.
You know, how mean they looking, how cool are they looking,
(15:03):
and so forth.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
And of course this squares with what you were talking
about last time, Rob with the lobster urine. In competition
between aggressive lobsters, the urine shares state information about, for example,
prior victory or defeat in these agonistic encounters. Sounds a
lot like Again, people might people might quibble with the
(15:25):
use of the word emotion, but that feels something like
emotion to me, like feeling victorious or feeling defeated.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Yeah, like like I believe one of the papers was
I was talking about there being a lot of serotonin
in the urine of a victorious lobster. You know, it's
it's that an emotional stay. Maybe not, but it's saying
something about like where that that creature's physiology is following
a specific victory.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
So I don't know when we started doing this series
about about urine based communication, I don't think I realized
we would come up with so many examples where it
looked like the urine was not only sharing just the
more relatively fix I mean, I guess nothing biological is
really fixed, but the more stable sort of biological health
(16:13):
information not just that, but sharing something like psychological information,
sharing something the urine says something about what's going on
in your nervous system and in your brain, which we
may call emotions or we may call intentions or motivations.
That's being communicated through urine as well. And to me,
(16:34):
that makes it a lot more like what we think
of with language. I mean, we've made these distinctions before
about the differences between what you can say with urine
versus what you can say with language. Obviously, language is
going to be much much more versatile because you can intentionally,
voluntarily craft an infinite number of different kinds of messages,
(16:55):
truthful or deceptive, and urine may not have that level
of versatility, but it can communicate not just these sort
of stable facts about the body, but can communicate this
fleeting information about the mind and if you want to
get touchy feely the soul. I guess that just causes
(17:15):
me to think about P based communication as something with
more potential for kind of meaning and complexity. You know
that it carries potentially emotional information, that it lends itself
more to the idea that there could be P based literature.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Yeah, yeah, I think yeah. By and large, all this
information we're looking at does drive home the fact that
humans just don't We don't speak urine for the most part.
We have a very blunt understanding of what urine is
and what it can convey, and it's just a much
richer experience for other animals, to the point that it's
(17:52):
not really urine for them anymore, not in the human sense,
Like our language for urine is kind of inadequate to
truly describe what it is for various other species. Now
(18:13):
I want to bring things back to the mammal world
here to the surface world, in particular, to talk about
the flemen response. This may have been on some of
your minds as we were talking about this topic in
earlier episodes, because in evaluating the urine communication of another,
it may prove necessary to assume the fleming response, as
(18:36):
it was dubbed by German zoologist Karl max Schneider in
the nineteen thirties, but the expression itself had been known
to naturalists since at least the eighteenth century. The term
flemen apparently comes from upper saxon German, where it means
to curl the upper lip and or to look spiteful.
It's not just for smelling urine, but that's certainly one
(18:57):
of the odorous bouquets that it picks upon.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
So the word am I understanding in the human context
originally refers to an expression like a sneer the curled lip.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Yeah, a sneer that you know, honestly, I don't know
that you see, or I don't know, I feel like
you don't see. People make this face a lot, and
we'll come back to one of the reasons why. But
in general, like how often do you see someone do
like a spiteful sneer in which they expose their upper teeth.
Like the main example I was finding. I found a
(19:31):
couple of articles that had a picture of Harrison Ford
doing the face, you know, maybe accidentally in the midst
of talking or something. But for the most part, the
main thing I was reminded of is the snarl that
Bela Lugosi gives in some of the in some one
particular scene, but also some production stills for the nineteen
thirties Dracula.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Oh okay, you attached a picture in the outline, and
I can see that he he almost looks not quite
human here. It looks a bit like a like a
big cat.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's key because we do see
this in cats. We see it in big cats, and
we see it in house cats, and in the world
of house cats it is sometimes informally referred to as
the stinky kitty face.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
I didn't know about that.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Yeah, it's one of these things where you know, as
a cat owner it's going to obviously things are going
to vary depending on the exact nature and personality of
your cat, but it's something you'll pick up on them
doing from time to time, they might be checking out
something that you would associate with a smell, like, I
don't know, a spot on the couch or a pair
of shoes, that sort of thing. It might also just
(20:41):
be a little less clear what they are responding to,
but generally the idea is that they are assuming this
kind of a sneer that also looks a little bit goofy,
and what they are doing is they are heightening their
exposure to the odor so as to better analyze it. Interesting, So,
(21:02):
in general, across various animals, you're going to see this
generally entailing a curling back of the upper lip, exposure
of the top teeth, and breathing. And then they're going
to breathe in slowly through the mouth alone. And this
is all about allowing better access of smells and pheromones
to the specialized vomber nasal organ, the vn O or
(21:23):
the Jacobsen's organ. This is a chemoreception organ in the
roof of the mouth. This occurs in ungulates as well,
horses and giraftes, which both smell and in the latter
example of the diraffe's they also taste the urine of
mares that are in estrus.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Huh okay, well wait a minute. That makes me wonder
if all these other mammals have a vombar nasal organ
do we have one? Can we? Can we smell with
the roof of our mouth like this?
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Humans do not, so far as anyone can apparently tell,
have one of these, at least not a functional one.
Is a According to twenty fourteen's Encyclopedia of the Neurological Sciences,
second edition by Moon, at all vomor on nasal organs
are prominent in the fetus and show up vestigially in adults.
Though there has apparently been a lot of back and
(22:16):
forth debate over this, it seems like the majority of view, though,
is that while some primates have functional vomiting and nasal organs,
mainly like New World monkeys, chimps, and humans do not.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
I'd also point out something that I saw referenced in
an article is that the obviousness of the fleming response
to humans in another organism, like how pronounced the fleming
response is, doesn't necessarily correlate to how strong their ability
to sense things happens to be, which I guess is
(22:51):
kind of a no brainer. When you're driving home like that.
But you know, some fleming responses are really wild, like
included a photo here of a horse's women response where
they just look like matt demons, whereas certainly a housecat's
flimen response just looks a little bit funny. You know.
But our interpretation of it doesn't actually necessarily give us
(23:14):
any clues into how strong their ability to sense things
happens to be. But we again, we certainly see it
again in ungulates and dogs and cats and other mammals.
I've even seen articles looking at the fleming response in
things like sea otters and elephants. So it's all over
the place.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
That's interesting. I'm going to be on the lookout for
it now.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Yeah, if you spend any time with cats, you will
see the stinky kitty face from time to time. And yeah,
it's just a sign that there's some sort of smell
going on. Don't take it personally. It doesn't mean it's
you or something in your environment. They might just but
something has occurred or they've noticed something that requires just
a little more in depth analysis.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Well, I would like to transition to something else, but
we're gonna stick with mammals at least for the moment,
so I want to mention an interesting paper I came
across about social urination in mammals, which may or may
not turn out to be communicative in nature. This paper
was by ana Onishi, James Brooks, Sota Inoe, and Shinya Yamamoto,
(24:16):
published in Current Biology in twenty twenty five this year,
and it's called socially contagious urination in Chimpanzees, So I
hope that title's got your interest piqued. The authors here
are affiliated with a few different institutions in Japan, such
as Kyoto University. I was also reading an article about
(24:37):
this paper in Scientific American that I wanted to flag.
This was by Megan Bartel's from January twenty twenty five,
so apparently the lead author on this paper, ana Onishi,
was inspired in part by the fact that humans often
seemed to treat urination as a social behavior. This kind
(24:58):
of came up in our first episode of the series.
Despite the fact that we often think of urination as
a solitary activity, an activity where we seek at least
a visual isolation for the sake of modesty, in reality,
people often do treat urination or trips to the bathroom
as social occasions. So think about it like this. You
(25:20):
are out somewhere and a restaurant or a concert, public event,
and somebody from the group you're with says they're going
to go to the bathroom, and then somebody else says, oh,
wait up, I'll go with you, and then somebody else
says me too. Hey, it is actually a socially organized
social trip to the bathroom. People are urinating as a group.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
You know, I hadn't thought about this as much until
you mentioned it. But you could also factor our social
technology into this equation and say, well, what even if
you go to the bathroom by yourself during one of
these situations, there's a very strong possibility you are going
to check your phone, and in doing so, you are
going to engage in some alternate online socialization whilst going
(26:05):
to the bathroom. I don't know to what extent we
should factor that into all of this, but maybe you
could make a case or even solitary urination is social
given the right technology.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Socially coordinated, synchronized trips to urinate are actually very common.
And this is not just part of American culture where
I'm familiar with it. The author of this scientific American
article actually mentions there is a word in Japanese. It
is sura sean t s u r E s h
o n, which refers to the phenomenon where people get
(26:39):
up and go to the bathroom as a group.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
That would be interesting to get into. It makes me
think of the various kai traditions that involve the potential threats,
or at least that the very scary things that it
can occur when you go to a dark bathroom at
night by yourself. Yeah. I can't help but wonder to
what extent these two things might be connected culturally.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
Yeah, the bathroom stall ghosts. Yeah. And there are other
examples of biological activities that seem to be socially contagious.
One example is yawning, and I think we've all experienced this.
Somebody else yawns, you see them yawn and then you
yawn yourself, or maybe even inter species contagious yawning. You
(27:22):
yawn and then your dog yawns, or vice versa. A
very interesting question about why seeing somebody else yawn makes
you more likely to yawn. Maybe we could come back
to that in the future, if we haven't done a
whole episode on that before.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Have.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
We actually don't remember.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
I don't think we have. Yawning. Yeah, that would be
a good one, you know, if only to generate the
responses that. I can't believe they did an episode on yawning.
So boring. No, it's probably pretty exciting.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Also, scratching, Hey, that's exciting. What's more exciting than the scratching?
Scratching is contagious as well, socially contagious. Scratching. You see
somebody scratch, you're more likely to scratch.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Yeah, scratching could be Yeah, it could easily be its
own episode as well. That one gets pretty intense anyway.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
So, while observing chimpanzees as a doctoral researcher at the
Kyoto University Wildlife Research Center, the lead author of this paper,
Onishi thought she observed a similar pattern of socially contagious
urination among the chimpanzees, so she staged a quantitative experiment
(28:27):
to measure whether this was really the case. The way
it worked is researchers studied a group of twenty chimpanzees
living in captivity at a place called Kumamoto Sanctuary in Japan,
and they filmed them and reviewed more than six hundred
hours of footage to meticulously track exactly when each ape urinated,
(28:49):
where it was at the time, and who was nearby.
Then they created a computer simulation of randomized chimpanzee urination
to compare the actual results to and the analysis revealed
that chimpanzees were not just peeing randomly, there actually was
social correlation. On average, an ape was significantly more likely
(29:11):
to pee if another ape had just peed within the
past sixty seconds, and especially if that ape was very
close by within ten feet so up ip. Another interesting
factor beyond time and proximity was social rank. The researchers
looked into whether the identity and social rank of each
(29:34):
urinate or mattered in how much how much influence there
was from one ap peeing to another ap peeing, and
the identities did matter. So they initially looked to see
whether the ape equivalent of social friendship was an influence,
and it seems the answer there was no, but social
(29:54):
rank was an influence. As quoted in Scientific American Onniche
said quote, I initially expected that if social influences existed,
they might resemble those seen in yawning, such as stronger
contagion between socially close pairs that in itself is an
interesting thing about yawning that, like social social closeness makes
(30:16):
the yawn more contagious. But that is not what they found,
continuing the quote from oneishi. Instead, we observed a clear
influence of social rank, with lower ranking individuals being more
likely to follow the urination of others. So if you
are a lower ranking chimpanzee in the group, it might
(30:37):
be more like the boss PE's ip, or maybe you
know the cooler person ps ip. Now some caveats here.
Obviously this was done in captive chimpanzees, and when a
behavior is observed in captive animals, it's always worth asking
whether the same behavior is seen in the wild. Some
(30:57):
strange traits emerge in zoos or labs or sanctuaries that
are not seen in wild conspecifics. The researchers here believe
for a number of reasons that this probably is also
true in the wild, but that's worth investigating on its
own and follow up research. But finally we come to
the question of would this contagious urination count as communication.
(31:19):
If one ape is getting a signal from another ape
to do something, I think that is communication. Though It's
funny because here it's not, as far as we know,
anything like the smell of my urine will now give
you updated information about my health that you can use
in determining how to act. Instead, it's more like the
fact that I am peeing informs you that it is
(31:41):
also time for you to pee. Now, what is the
value of that? Why would it be biologically useful for
one ape to signal to another that it's time to pee.
It's possible that it could have some role in maintaining
general social cohesion in a way that's hard for us
to understand. So like, when you think about it, a
(32:02):
lot of synchronized group bonding behaviors among humans would be
really hard to explain the exact biological utility of except
to say that we just know because we are humans
and we know how we feel when we do them.
We can say that doing these things together at the
same time makes us feel more bonded and helps motivate
(32:24):
us to cooperate with each other in other domains. So
there is clearly some synchronized activities just contribute to social
cohesion and bonding. Not always easy to say why, but
they do.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Yeah, yeah, I mean this way, you're not splitting the
party every time, every time this random individual wants to
pay or needs to pay.
Speaker 3 (32:44):
Beyond establishing and maintaining social cohesion, there are a few
other ideas the authors mention. One idea is that coordinated
urination may play, to quote the paper quote, potential roles
in preparation for collective departure, i e. Avoiding before long
distance travel. So you know, parents may be familiar with this, Like,
(33:06):
you know, we're about to go on a car trip.
You need to go to the bathroom before we leave.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Yeah, yeah, this is a This is a big one.
This is a This is a frequent point of discussion
in my household.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
And even apart from long distance travel. One researcher quoted
in the Scientific American article just pointed out the idea
of a daily routine among chimpanzees. So at different times
throughout the day, chimpanzees will often get up and relocate
to a different place. These relocations as a group are
generally controlled by higher ranking chimpanzees in the group, the
(33:40):
group leaders. So it could be that the group leader pees,
signaling I am about to initiate a relocation. It is
time for the bathroom break before we move, and then
the others notice that the leader is peeing, and they
follow suit because they know they're about to relocate. Another
possible explanation that means the authors mentioned could be quote
(34:02):
territorial scent marking i e. Coordination of chemosensory signals. So
what's better than you individually doing a territorial scent mark
with your pe getting all your buds to mark at
the same time. One can imagine that this does a
number of things. It increases detectability allah where we were
talking about elevated scent marking and dogs, It's important to
(34:24):
make your scent markings in the environment more detectable. But
also you can think about the amount of information presented
with a whole group peeing together instead of just one,
you know, peeing individually, and maybe also more individuals peeing
would communicate more of a threat level within the collective mark.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Yeah. Depending on sensitivity to these markers, you might think, Okay, well,
this is either a whole bunch of chimps and not
just one individual, or if it is one individual, it's
one huge chimp. I gets there's no messing with this guy.
This is not potential prey or some chimp that I
can possibly best and about just best to keep my distance.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
So anyway, chimpanzee p based communication. They pee to communicate
about peeing for the purpose of peeing. That's fascinating and
maybe for other purposes as well. But yeah, I thought
that was good.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
All right. As we round out this episode, I want
to come back to a topic that I've teased out
a couple of times in the previous episodes, and that
is the idea that even if humans cannot speak urine
as well as other creatures, and certainly can't read urine
as well as other creatures, we do have the advantage
(35:50):
of having technology. And this is where we get into
the field of your analysis. Your analysis, via lab work,
automated systems, and now even artificial intelligence, can reveal quite
a lot about a person. Your analysis is used to
detect and manage a wide range of disorders, to check
overall health, to look for particular conditions, and or to
(36:13):
manage known conditions. Some very general prognosis can be made
visually with a human urine sample if you know what
you're doing. But much in your analysis is revealed via
lab work and via machines and technology. Yeah, uh, that's
not going to become as a shocker to many of you.
We've all had to give urine samples that the doctor
(36:36):
before uh, and they've given us the lab read out
and or we've you know, we've paid for that that
uh that that lab v on top of our visit.
It's worth pointing out, by the way, technically urine does
contain DNA, but DNA deteriorates quickly in human urine and
is not the best source of DNA for say, forensic
(36:57):
analysis and so forth.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
I don't know this is the reason, but I would
imagine there are other chemicals in the urine that probably
attack the DNA and break it down.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Yeah, that's my understanding. Yeah, so you know, things like
certainly blood saliva, these are far better sources for DNA. So, like,
if you were dealing with like a hardcore like TV
forensics example, I guess there might be a scenario, and
there may be scenarios where some sort of a like
like usable DNA information is obtainable via urine sample, but
(37:30):
for the most part, like it's considered like not a
great source of DNA. Now, in the last episode, we
did mention in passing the idea of using someone else's
urine as a way to dupe a drug test, a
urinary drug test. This is indeed a well known aspect
of human urine evaluation. Everyone's familiar with this an eve.
(37:51):
If you haven't been had your urine tested for work
or some sort of legal process in the past, you've
probably seen it on I believe there's a famous episode
of The Office that I only vaguely remember, but I
know I've seen it that involves like drug testing of
the Office because what Dwight found half a joint in
the parking lot.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Oh do they have to pee for that? I don't remember.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
Yeah, I was trying to refresh on this. I think
like Michael Scott, the boss on The Office, ends up
getting paranoid because he once quote got high accidentally at
an Alicia Keys concert, and so he's he's like trying
to pressure Dwight into giving him some clean urine that
he use.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Yeah, but though it has played for jokes here, I mean,
I guess, I guess p fraud is a real thing
in the world because some people are going to want
to avoid avoid the implications of a drug test.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
That's right. And while we did mention the idea of
using someone else's urine, as occurs in this episode of
the Office or there there's the attempt to do this,
and I've seen this particular plot point come up in
other shows as well. We didn't mention another option that
has certainly entered the market over the past many years,
and that is the use of synthetic human urine. This
(39:01):
is indeed apparently a product you can get that at
least claims. You know, I'm not going to get into
certainly into individual brands or claims made by these brands,
but you can go to places and you can buy
something that claims to be synthetic human urine for the
express purpose of duping a urinary drug test.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
Now this may be new to many of you, but
to be clear, we've actually had synthetic human urine for
a very long time. I was reading about this at
on the website Maoclinic Proceedings dot org and they point
out that German chemist Frederick Wohler, who lived eighteen hundred
to eighteen eighty two, was the first to produce synthetic urine,
(39:41):
synthetic human urine back in eighteen twenty eight.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Well, the date on that discovery makes me think that
that was not intended to fool a drug test, so
there must be uses for it beyond beyond just the
p fraud.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
Absolutely, Yeah, this was not for a drug test welder.
It was a was a prolific and highly influential chemist.
We may have brought him up on the show before.
I feel like there's a strong possibility and the main
tangible benefit of the at the time for the creation
of synthetic human urine was for testing of medical equipment,
and this is something it's still used for today. In fact,
(40:17):
you can easily you can go online. You can find
like medical grade companies that sell synthetic human urine and
it will often be calibrated for very specific testing purposes,
like you want to test this kind of medical equipment
and you need synthetic urine to do so, Well, here's
the right kind of urine for that test, okay. And
(40:37):
so that was kind of like the broad call for
synthetic urine at the time, but there was this There's
an entire additional layer to Frederick go Oulder's contribution here
as well. So his synthesis of human urea without the
aid of a human kidney proved that organic compounds could
(40:58):
be synthesized without the aid of the quote unquote vital
force found in a living organism, getting here into the
vital force theory or vitalism, which on the whole argue
that you could not reduce life to a mechanistic or
certainly a chemical explanation, like you couldn't just create something
that a human or animal body made, because there is
(41:22):
something beyond our science in that body that is making
the substance in question.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
Oh okay, So while I think you could still argue
today that there might be something in the more ambiguous
term life that is not quite captured in reproducible chemical experiments,
basically all of the processes within the body could be
recreated in the lab.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Yeah, and I think getting back into our own blunted
human understanding of urine, most people today certainly are not
going to hear this and think, well, that's blasphemous. You
can't synthesize human urine. Human urine is holy and it
is made only by a human body. Like nobody's really
probably feeling that because we don't think about urine as
having any intrinsic value. It is just waste product that
(42:06):
on the whole we prefer not to produce. It just
kind of gets in the way. Of course, as we've
been discussing dogs, lobsters, so many other animals if they
could express, if they could, you know, express feelings about urine,
would disagree with us and they might say no. A
dog might say no, urine is holy, Urine is information,
(42:27):
and it comes from a dog, or it comes from
some other animal. And that is what I'm reading. And
the idea that you could fake that is just you know,
abysmal p.
Speaker 3 (42:38):
Is vitalistic poetry. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Yeah, So at the time this was actually a big
deal though, because even though it was quote unquote just
urine that was synthesized, it paved the way for so
many world changing advancements in organic chemistry. So again coming
back to today, Yes, you can buy synthetic urine in
various places, either or legitimate medical testing purposes, educational purposes,
(43:04):
but also products that seem to be intended just for
the duping of drug tests.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
I haven't looked these up. How are they marketed? Do
they just say like, fool a drug test on them,
or do they have euphemistic language.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
I'm not going to mention any products by name, but
some of them have like expectedly kind of goofy product
names like, you can definitely, or it seems to me,
you can definitely tell the difference between a product that
is marketed for clinical usage versus things that are marketed
for the duping of drug drug tests. I think it's
(43:38):
pretty obvious. But these products, if I'm understanding this correctly,
and maybe the literature is a little incomplete on when
things like this start popping up, but I believe we've
had products like this on the market of some sort
since like the late nineties, so they've been around for
a while. I had not heard of them, so I
thought this was maybe like a very new thing, But yeah,
(44:00):
these products have been around. Some of them are banned
in certain areas, certain states, for example now because of
their usage to try and you doup at drug test. Now,
synthetic urine in general, the varieties aimed at drug tests
but also clinically, they've grown quite advanced, and of course
this has led to advancements in drug testing. So I
(44:24):
was reading some sources here that we're talking about how
drug tests have had to look for new markers in
synthetic urines that can then be targeted on a drug
test so that they can figure out like, Okay, well
this is obvious urine looks clean, but it's also obviously purchased,
you know, at the local smoke shop.
Speaker 3 (44:45):
This is the evolutionary arms race in the synthetic urine
and the drug tests.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
Yeah, and of course you can't help but imagine what
would a dog think of all this? Like they would
probably like it would be like, you know, because there's
probably a similar discussion to be made around say, AI
generated literature, you know, where you know, someone might say, well,
how could you possibly be fooled by this? Like clearly
was written by a machine and so forth, Like the
dogs probably have a very low would have a very
(45:14):
uh like low estimation of synthetic urines and like what
it's telling them. Though, I guess that's that's a whole
topic under unto itself that we're not really going to
get into today into today, like to what degree does
synthetic urine fool animals that have these heightened senses to
understand it?
Speaker 3 (45:31):
Or I wonder would the dog really have the the
concept of authenticity when reading the urine or would it
just be like, huh, this is from a strange type
of creature I've never encountered before that's.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Right, it would might maybe be more like, this is
a this is a weird communication that I'm reading, This
is a very strange dog. More information is required. I
probably need to see this dog in person now to
be clear. Outside of the market for synthetic human urine,
there is also a market for synthetic and animal urines.
Speaker 3 (46:02):
Wait a minute for could this be for scent marking
fraud essentially carried out by humans?
Speaker 1 (46:08):
Yeah? Yeah, in instances where there is some sort of
a human interest involved in some sort of communication fraud
with animal urine. One example of this that you can
find pretty readily, say online is synthetic deer urine. And
this is apparently a product that exists because you have
(46:30):
in the past used actual deer urine to say, you know,
bait a buck, that sort of a thing. But there
are a number of states that have banned the use
of actual deer urine to help prevent the spread of
chronic wasting disease and deer ah. Okay, yeah, Because to
come back to urine in general, like urine, healthy human urine,
(46:52):
for example, is generally thought to be largely sterile. But yes,
there are various things that can be various contaminants, various
illnesses that can be contracted through unhealthy urine.
Speaker 3 (47:05):
So this would be using animal urine fraud for the
purpose of an attractant by hunters. But I've read about
animal urine fraud being used for the opposite purpose to
deter animals by using a predator urine. So you you
synthesize there's not really a cougar in the area, but
you put cougar pee out there, and it supposedly it
(47:26):
will keep away the pest animals that you don't want
in your garden or whatever.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Exactly, yes, And that is the other major synthetic urine
product that you see. And this is another case though,
where there are products that at least claim to use
actual urine from say fox or a bear, or you know,
whatever the predator happens to be, and then there are
cases where they're making a point of it being synthetic
(47:51):
animal urine. I can't speak to the to how efficient
these are, but you know, coming back to our dog example,
if they are a fish enough to raise the specter
of a potential predator being present, then perhaps it is
useful enough. We talked about chimpanzees. I want to mention
that for medical purposes, you can also buy synthetic chimpanzee urine.
(48:16):
I included a link here for you, Joe. If you
look around for it, you can find it. There's one
company in particular that has a website and they have
various forms of synthetic human urine that is to be
clear intended for clinical purposes and the testing of like
medical equipment and tests, and educational purposes as well. But
you can also buy synthetic chimpanzee urine for the same purpose, because,
(48:40):
of course the study of chimpanzee physiology and chimpanzee biological
responses is vitally important for human medicine as well.
Speaker 3 (48:49):
But is it cheaper than the synthetic human urine, And
if so, with somebody trying to pass the drug tests,
save a few bucks and get the chimpanzee urine instead.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
Well, let's check real quick. I'll pull up the website. Okay,
I'm looking at the costs for simulated monkey urine. Okay,
all right, okay, and then let's see. You know, it
looks about like it's the same price for humans, so
there's no there's no need to go cheaper for chimp urine.
I have a feeling chimp urine would not work. I
(49:19):
feel like they would catch you if you try to
use chimp urine to synthetic chimp urine to pass a
like a work drug test. But also I should add
that you're probably I'm thinking most of the people trying
to pass a drug test using the synthetic urine, they're
probably not buying it from a biomedical company. They're buying
it a like at the local smoke shop or something
(49:40):
from some other supplier, which I'm assuming are you know,
ultimately not the same corporation.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
Listeners, if anybody in the audience has ever tried to
spoof a drug test by using like cougar urine or something,
let us know how that went. Did it work?
Speaker 1 (49:57):
Yeah? Or in general, if there are people out there
who have exp using synthetic animal urines either to attract
or drive away organisms, write in with your experiences with
these products. You know, we're not going to mention specific products,
you know, obviously, but in general, I'd love to hear
how this has worked, Like maybe get an idea of
like the where the science is in terms of making
(50:20):
synthetic urine that can not only be useful for biomedical
purposes and testing equipment in the human world, but potentially
in communicating with other animals, even in a very blunt manner.
Speaker 3 (50:32):
Yeah. Oh, and hey, we also we know we've got
a lot of scientists in the audience. If you use
synthetic urine in your research, let us know how what
do you use it for?
Speaker 1 (50:40):
Yeah? Absolutely, all right, on that note, we're going to
go and close up this episode, but yeah, right in,
we'd love to hear from everyone, Just to remind that
The Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science
and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays
and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to
just talk about a weird film on weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (50:57):
Huge things, as always to our excellent to your 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 that Stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
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
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