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6 Ways Animals Pee Weird
6 Ways Animals Pee Weird
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Phụ đề (237)
0:00
When most of us hit a certain age,
0:02
urination stops being a thing we find funny.
0:04
But that doesn’t mean urination can’t still be fascinating.
0:08
Especially when you look beyond the pee coming
0:10
out of human bodies to the rest of the animal kingdom.
0:12
Because peeing does a lot more than get rid of waste.
0:15
It can help lobsters find love. It can help dogs lie to each other.
0:18
It can even help monkeys avoid getting sick.
0:21
We’ve got six examples of weird animal urination habits for you, today.
0:25
So take a quick bathroom break if you need to, and we’ll get started.
0:29
[♪INTRO]
0:32
Okay I did say that peeing does a lot more than get rid of waste.
0:35
But let’s start there for a quick reminder.
0:37
Your kidneys help keep you alive by performing a variety of to-dos,
0:41
like flushing out toxins, and balancing your blood chemistry.
0:44
Producing urine, which you then excrete,
0:47
is how they accomplish all those tasks.
0:49
And this kind is more or less the same across a lot of different
0:51
kinds of animals, including some that you might not think of… like fish.
0:55
That’s right. Fish pee! Presumably, none of them ever get grossed
0:58
out about constantly swimming in their own diluted urine stream.
1:01
Some fish species have an opening that expels both liquid and
1:04
solid waste. Others have a specialized pee hole just like we do.
1:07
But fish have another way to expel their waste.
1:10
Specifically, they can flush excess salt and nitrogen out via their gills.
1:14
Which is a handy dandy adaptation if ever there was one.
1:17
And with that little demo out of the way, let’s move
1:19
onto an animal that uses its pee to say something.
1:22
You know, without writing its name in the snow or whatever.
1:25
Lots of animals use pheromones to attract and assess potential mates.
1:28
These are chemicals that animals emit to
1:30
send signals to other members of their species.
1:33
And lobsters release their pheromones via, you guessed it, their pee.
1:37
A lobsters’ bladder is located in its head, just underneath its brain.
1:41
And it pees via pores at the base of its antennas.
1:44
I know this might sound like an evolutionary
1:45
disaster that life simply found a way around.
1:48
But if you’re a lobster, peeing out your head is actually useful if you
1:53
spend most of your time backed into your little lobster burrow tail-first!
1:57
It also gives you a quick way to communicate
1:58
with other lobsters in the area around you.
2:01
Special glands mix pheromones into the urine before it’s released,
2:05
and that urine stream can travel up to seven feet through the water!
2:09
A lobster can send a message via pee
2:11
a Shaquille O’Neal length distance away.
2:14
Male lobsters use these pee pheromones
2:17
to intimidate other male lobsters and attract females.
2:20
In which case, the female then takes her turn.
2:22
When she shows up, she pees in the male’s face,
2:25
using her own pheromones to tell him to cool it with
2:28
the aggression and let her into his burrow so they can mate.
2:31
She also sends signals to any other females in
2:33
the area that this male is spoken for. At least for now.
2:36
The female will stick around for a few weeks,
2:38
and then the pair will split up and move onto new mates.
2:41
That’s right. Apologies to fans of the sitcom Friends,
2:43
but lobsters do not mate for life.
2:45
But instead of leaving you with that bummer of a correction,
2:47
how about something more hopeful: humans have found
2:50
a use for lobster urine, too. Just not for romance.
2:53
Scientists in Florida have found that lobster pee repels coral-eating snails,
2:58
helping protect sensitive coral reefs from damage!
3:00
So the ocean is full of weird urination habits. But so are the rivers.
3:05
Between 2014 and 2018, a group of scientists observed male Amazon
3:09
river dolphins sending streams of pee arcing into the air 36 times.
3:14
During these, quote, “aerial urination events”, the males
3:18
would turn themselves upside down, stick their
3:21
penises out of the water, and let loose. But… why?
3:24
Why not just pee into the water, since it’s going to end up there anyway?!
3:28
The scientists who witnessed this behavior noted that,
3:31
not long after given event, another male dolphin usually
3:35
approached and stuck his snout into the stream of urine.
3:38
Marine mammals generally don’t have much of a sense of smell,
3:42
but the researchers inferred maybe river dolphins have sensory
3:45
receptors on their snouts that let them detect pheromones
3:48
and other chemicals in each other’s urine.
3:51
And since river dolphins have bristles on their snouts that
3:54
we mostly think are for sensing movement and vibrations in the water,
3:58
the researchers also proposed that maybe these bristles
4:00
could be involved in picking up chemical signals as well.
4:03
In other words, these aerial pee streams could be a form of
4:06
chemical communication that males use to assert their
4:09
dominance over each other, kind of like with the horny lobsters.
4:12
However, another expert on mammal
4:14
senses chimed in with some skepticism.
4:16
In his response, published in the same journal a few months later,
4:20
he says there’s no anatomical evidence that the dolphin’s snout
4:23
bristles can sense chemicals or smells.
4:26
In fact, there’s no mammal that we know of
4:28
that has sensory bristles that work like that.
4:31
Instead, this scientist thinks the dolphins could be playing.
4:34
Or they could just like sticking their penises
4:36
out of the water while swimming on their backs,
4:38
and the whole peeing part could just be a coincidence.
4:41
When you gotta go, you gotta go.
4:42
Even if you’re gonna confuse some hairless apes whose
4:45
brains love finding patterns in data that aren’t really there.
4:49
Now, we do know that members of another dolphin species,
4:52
the bottlenose dolphin, can recognize each other from urine samples.
4:55
So river dolphin pee communication isn’t completely out of left field.
4:59
But the jury’s still out on this one.
5:01
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6:31
Up next: monkeys. A lot of monkey species
6:33
do this thing called urine washing.
6:35
As in, they appear to wash themselves with their own urine.
6:38
And I’m not talking casually letting a little pee trickle down their legs.
6:42
They actively pee on their hands and then
6:45
rub it on themselves, or sometimes each other.
6:47
The obvious question is once again “Why?!” Much like our river dolphin
6:51
mystery, scientists don’t know. But there are several hypotheses.
6:54
It could be another example of animals sending signals
6:57
to each other via chemicals and scents in their pee.
6:59
But it could also have nothing to do with communication.
7:03
Monkeys might pee on themselves just to cool themselves off.
7:06
This is something other animals do, like birds.
7:09
Okay technically birds don’t pee in the traditional sense.
7:12
It comes out at the same time as their poop,
7:14
out their one-stop-shop hole called a cloaca.
7:16
Or maybe, urine washing helps monkeys spread
7:19
parasite-fighting chemicals from plants or bugs over their skin.
7:24
In addition to urine washing, a lot of monkeys do something
7:26
called anointing, where they rub things like
7:29
leaves, fruit, mud, and insects on themselves.
7:32
Some monkeys like to combine this with urine washing,
7:34
so some primatologists speculate that if anointing is
7:37
a way of self-medicating against parasites, then urine could
7:41
help them apply the antiparasitic compounds to all the right body parts.
7:45
But it’s also possible that urine washing could improve a monkey’s grip.
7:48
In a study of wild white-faced capuchins in Costa Rica,
7:52
the monkeys did more urine-washing in dry weather,
7:55
especially when they were near fruit trees.
7:57
The researchers proposed this could mean the monkeys
7:59
were rubbing pee on their hands and feet to make them sticky,
8:02
so they could get a better grip on the dry tree branches.
8:06
As you can see, different studies have backed up different
8:08
possible explanations for urine-washing in different monkey species.
8:12
So it’s possible it has multiple purposes.
8:14
Whatever they are, I’ll stick to washing my hands with soap and water.
8:18
We’re not done with the urination habits of our primate cousins.
8:21
Because in chimpanzees, it seems that peeing might be contagious.
8:24
You know, like a human yawn.
8:26
In 2025, researchers studying a group of chimps at
8:29
a wildlife sanctuary in Japan reported that when one
8:32
chimp started to pee, others were likely to follow suit.
8:35
Specifically, a second chimp was more likely to pee if it was physically
8:38
closer to the initial urinator, and if it was lower in social rank.
8:42
This isn’t exactly like contagious yawning, though.
8:45
Some studies have suggested humans are more
8:48
likely to “catch” a yawn from someone we feel close to.
8:51
But in this chimpanzee population, two chimps being buddies did not
8:55
make it more likely that one would follow the other’s lead when peeing.
8:59
The researchers who documented this case of this “social urination” hope
9:02
their work will spur more research, because this is apparently the first time
9:06
anyone has collected data on this phenomenon in any animal species.
9:10
Or should I say any non-human animal species.
9:13
Because we’ve got plenty of anecdotal evidence that humans
9:16
sometimes like to take bathroom breaks in groups…
9:19
even if they’re for completely different reasons than other primates.
9:22
Sometimes we even leave each other
9:24
messages on the walls of the bathroom stalls.
9:26
Which brings me to our final entry for this list show.
9:29
Like many other animals, dogs use scent
9:30
marking to leave messages for each other.
9:32
They urinate on objects in their environment, and other dogs can smell
9:36
what’s left to learn about the urinater’s size, social status, and so forth.
9:41
But according to a paper published in 2018,
9:43
dogs could use their pee to lie about who they are.
9:46
See, one way dogs and other scent-marking animals make
9:49
themselves stand out is by elevating their scent marks.
9:52
Peeing on elevated or vertical surfaces helps keep the smells
9:56
from getting lost among other scents on the ground,
9:58
and places them closer to nose-level, which is far more convenient.
10:03
Across multiple species, males are more
10:05
likely to elevate their scent marks than females.
10:07
And data from mongooses and pandas shows that animals of both
10:11
sexes spend more time sniffing around higher scent marks.
10:14
Basically, they’re interested in big, competitive males
10:17
that may be lurking around, for different reasons.
10:19
Now, researchers used to think that scent marks were what’s called an
10:22
honest signal, conveying accurate information about the urinater.
10:26
But a 2012 paper found that small male mongooses were
10:29
leaving higher scent marks than expected, relative to their size.
10:32
In other words, it seemed like they were
10:34
pretending to be bigger than they really were.
10:36
This brings us back to dogs. For that 2018 paper,
10:39
researchers studied scent marking by adult male dogs at
10:42
two animal shelters in New York State to figure out whether
10:45
these dogs were using their pee to lie about their size.
10:48
They found that bigger dogs typically left higher urine marks, meaning yes,
10:52
other dogs can get information on the urinator's size from this.
10:56
But, they also found that small dogs were raising their legs higher,
11:00
to get their pee higher relative to their height, than large dogs.
11:04
But as much as they were trying to lie… as much as dogs are
11:07
capable of lying, anyway…they can’t be completely dishonest.
11:11
The chemicals in their urine contain messages as well,
11:14
and those wouldn’t change.
11:15
The researchers think this particular kind of fibbing helps small dogs
11:19
avoid conflict with other males, rather than to attract females.
11:22
Unfortunately, we have not found the dog equivalent
11:25
of rounding up to 6 feet tall on your dating profile.
11:27
However, this study did have a few limitations.
11:30
For example, the team didn’t control for the fact that sometimes
11:33
dogs intentionally try to pee onto a mark left by a previous dog, or that
11:38
really big dogs can’t lift their legs too high or they risk losing their balance.
11:42
But they definitely think those little dogs are up to something.
11:45
And the next time you take your dog out to potty,
11:47
just be glad your dog doesn't pee out of his face.
11:54
[♪OUTRO]
