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6 Ways Animals Pee Weird
6 Ways Animals Pee Weird
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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.
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Because peeing does a lot more than get rid of waste.
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It can help lobsters find love. It can help dogs lie to each other.
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It can even help monkeys avoid getting sick.
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We’ve got six examples of weird animal urination habits for you, today.
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So take a quick bathroom break if you need to, and we’ll get started.
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[♪INTRO]
0:32
Okay I did say that peeing does a lot more than get rid of waste.
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But let’s start there for a quick reminder.
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Your kidneys help keep you alive by performing a variety of to-dos,
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like flushing out toxins, and balancing your blood chemistry.
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Producing urine, which you then excrete,
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is how they accomplish all those tasks.
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And this kind is more or less the same across a lot of different
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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.
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Specifically, they can flush excess salt and nitrogen out via their gills.
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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
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onto an animal that uses its pee to say something.
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You know, without writing its name in the snow or whatever.
1:25
Lots of animals use pheromones to attract and assess potential mates.
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These are chemicals that animals emit to
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send signals to other members of their species.
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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.
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And it pees via pores at the base of its antennas.
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I know this might sound like an evolutionary
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disaster that life simply found a way around.
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But if you’re a lobster, peeing out your head is actually useful if you
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spend most of your time backed into your little lobster burrow tail-first!
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It also gives you a quick way to communicate
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with other lobsters in the area around you.
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Special glands mix pheromones into the urine before it’s released,
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and that urine stream can travel up to seven feet through the water!
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A lobster can send a message via pee
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a Shaquille O’Neal length distance away.
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Male lobsters use these pee pheromones
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to intimidate other male lobsters and attract females.
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In which case, the female then takes her turn.
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When she shows up, she pees in the male’s face,
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using her own pheromones to tell him to cool it with
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the aggression and let her into his burrow so they can mate.
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She also sends signals to any other females in
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the area that this male is spoken for. At least for now.
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The female will stick around for a few weeks,
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and then the pair will split up and move onto new mates.
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That’s right. Apologies to fans of the sitcom Friends,
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but lobsters do not mate for life.
2:45
But instead of leaving you with that bummer of a correction,
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how about something more hopeful: humans have found
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a use for lobster urine, too. Just not for romance.
2:53
Scientists in Florida have found that lobster pee repels coral-eating snails,
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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
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river dolphins sending streams of pee arcing into the air 36 times.
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During these, quote, “aerial urination events”, the males
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would turn themselves upside down, stick their
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penises out of the water, and let loose. But… why?
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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,
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not long after given event, another male dolphin usually
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approached and stuck his snout into the stream of urine.
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Marine mammals generally don’t have much of a sense of smell,
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but the researchers inferred maybe river dolphins have sensory
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receptors on their snouts that let them detect pheromones
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and other chemicals in each other’s urine.
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And since river dolphins have bristles on their snouts that
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we mostly think are for sensing movement and vibrations in the water,
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the researchers also proposed that maybe these bristles
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could be involved in picking up chemical signals as well.
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In other words, these aerial pee streams could be a form of
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chemical communication that males use to assert their
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dominance over each other, kind of like with the horny lobsters.
4:12
However, another expert on mammal
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senses chimed in with some skepticism.
4:16
In his response, published in the same journal a few months later,
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he says there’s no anatomical evidence that the dolphin’s snout
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bristles can sense chemicals or smells.
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In fact, there’s no mammal that we know of
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that has sensory bristles that work like that.
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Instead, this scientist thinks the dolphins could be playing.
4:34
Or they could just like sticking their penises
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out of the water while swimming on their backs,
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and the whole peeing part could just be a coincidence.
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When you gotta go, you gotta go.
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Even if you’re gonna confuse some hairless apes whose
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brains love finding patterns in data that aren’t really there.
4:49
Now, we do know that members of another dolphin species,
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Some monkeys like to combine this with urine washing,
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so some primatologists speculate that if anointing is
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a way of self-medicating against parasites, then urine could
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help them apply the antiparasitic compounds to all the right body parts.
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But it’s also possible that urine washing could improve a monkey’s grip.
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In a study of wild white-faced capuchins in Costa Rica,
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the monkeys did more urine-washing in dry weather,
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especially when they were near fruit trees.
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The researchers proposed this could mean the monkeys
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were rubbing pee on their hands and feet to make them sticky,
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so they could get a better grip on the dry tree branches.
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As you can see, different studies have backed up different
8:08
possible explanations for urine-washing in different monkey species.
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So it’s possible it has multiple purposes.
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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.
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Because in chimpanzees, it seems that peeing might be contagious.
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You know, like a human yawn.
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In 2025, researchers studying a group of chimps at
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a wildlife sanctuary in Japan reported that when one
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chimp started to pee, others were likely to follow suit.
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Specifically, a second chimp was more likely to pee if it was physically
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closer to the initial urinator, and if it was lower in social rank.
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This isn’t exactly like contagious yawning, though.
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Some studies have suggested humans are more
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likely to “catch” a yawn from someone we feel close to.
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But in this chimpanzee population, two chimps being buddies did not
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make it more likely that one would follow the other’s lead when peeing.
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The researchers who documented this case of this “social urination” hope
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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…
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even if they’re for completely different reasons than other primates.
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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
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marking to leave messages for each other.
9:32
They urinate on objects in their environment, and other dogs can smell
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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
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themselves stand out is by elevating their scent marks.
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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.
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In other words, it seemed like they were
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pretending to be bigger than they really were.
10:36
This brings us back to dogs. For that 2018 paper,
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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.
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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.
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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]
