You’ve Got Pee-Mail, Part 3
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Land. And I am Joe McCormick. And we're back with part three in our series on urine-based communication in the animal kingdom. Uh,

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 language 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 language.

So in the last couple of episodes, we discussed a whole bunch of examples. We started off in part one talking about male Amazon river dolphins, which have been observed during the

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 about why animals with urinary bladders usually have voluntary control over urination as opposed to it just kind of leaking out whenever, wherever. And,

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 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 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 lobsters' faces, 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. Yeah, yeah. Returning first, I believe, to the waters and discussing something we teased out a little bit in our discussion of lobsters.

That's right. So, yes, in the in the previous episode, we talked about urine based communication in crustaceans. I wanted to return to the aquatic domain to mention female 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 2020. The author is Joachim 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 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 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 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, Froman points out that you cannot place long-lasting territorial scent marks. So a dog will tag its physical environment with territorial marks. It pees 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.

That's a good way of putting it. Yeah. With all of our like augmented reality, VR innovations that we're working on, Google Glass and all of that, we're essentially trying to create a world of dog pee and the reading of dog pee for the human experience. 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 or peed on them, I guess.

Uh, so lots of other land, land-based mammals that we've talked about do this, uh, you know, last time we talked about the dwarf mongooses who leave the anogenital scent marks by doing handstands. Um, but you can't 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 a different microbial environment in the water. From and from and 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 more temporary, used for what Froman calls short term.

term interactions and they will also more often be associated spatially with your own physical body from which they emerge rather than a fixed separate place in the environment.

So I get the feeling that in the water, there's going to be 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, you know, because of all these scents associated with physical locations in the water, everything just kind of gets washed around. So I wonder if in the water there, there may be a more.

Oh, I don't know. Maybe you can get little tiny whiffs of things that may have once been nearby, but they're going to be a lot less associated with physical places. That's a good point. So anyway, what are these short term interactions? They include things like mate choice, what Froman 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 last time. There's a bunch of similar work on crayfish as well. And Froman 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 goes

better allows at least one of the these crustaceans to figure 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 yeah this is something that um

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 an overt monetary value. There is often, you know, 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 that's very much the same math that's going on for these various organisms using the data that is available to them, which might be available to them in the form of urine. 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, oh, I'm just going to fold. Yeah.

Yeah, or there's always going to be a certain amount of data on the table, right? Yeah. And 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 in 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 looking at when you're dealing with mate competition in the wild. 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. Yeah. Anyway, so Froman here mentions a variable called resource holding potential or RHP. You might see this referred to in some research.

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 after talking about urine and RHP and 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 in the last episode.

In part two, we talked about some good reasons for thinking that dogs use urine-based signals to encode blood

not only the kind of fixed feeling information about individual identity, health and fitness, sex and mating status, but, 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

And they seem to use that information. They use it in cognition and learning still to be 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 is, this is Jeff, the dog down the street and not just a health status. Does it have parasites and all that, but also like Jeff is stressed out. Hmm.

Hmm. Or Jeff is happy. And that might affect how the dog that smells the pee behaves. Uh, we don't know for sure, but it, 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, their feelings and motivation states are familiar and meaningful to us.

But it seems there are some likely equivalents to this pee-based emotion or at least motivation state sharing, even among the colder and less snuggly inhabitants of the water. I think you could say that lobsters, as we talked about last time, and even fish, to some extent, pee their feelings.

Froman mentions that, quote, in juvenile Nile tilapia or Oreochromis niloticus, the exchange of chemical cues informs about the sender's motivation and about individual identity.

And then also speaking about neolamb prologus, a pulcher from and writes quote in this species, members of both sexes change their urination patterns during agonistic encounters, agonistic meaning aggressive encounters, competition, uh,

Quote, blocking olfactory contact between contestants led to an increase in fight 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, an aggression-mediated increase in urination frequency was accompanied by an increased amount of conjugated 11-ketotestosterone in the water. Thus, urine might not only transfer information about the contestant's resource-holding potential, but also about the appropriate

motivational state. So again, something about what this, uh, 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 ultimately

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 have significant overlap, at least in humans and in other animals we can think of.

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 attempt at deception, is going to be an important part of that standoff.

You know, how mean are they looking? How cool are they looking? Yeah. And so forth. 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, violence.

People might quibble with the use of the word emotion, but that feels something like emotion to me, like feeling victorious or feeling defeated. Yeah, like I believe one of the papers I was looking at was talking about there being a lot of serotonin in the urine of a victorious lobster. You know, is that an emotional state? Maybe not, but it's saying something about...

like where that that creature's physiology is following a specific victory. 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 fixed. I mean, I guess nothing biological is really fixed, but the more stable sort of biological health 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, that makes it a lot more like what we think of with language. I mean, we've made these distinctions before about the,

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, truthful or deceptive.

Uh, and, and urine may not have that, that level of versatility, but it can communicate, um, not just these sort of stable facts about the body, but, uh, can communicate this fleeting information about the mind. And, uh, if you want to get touchy feely, the soul.

I guess that just causes 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. Yeah, yeah. I think by and large, all of 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 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. ♪

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Now, I want to bring things back to the mammal world here, to the surface world in particular, to talk about the Fleming 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 it was dubbed by German zoologist Karl Max Schneider.

in the 1930s. But the expression itself had been known to naturalists since at least the 18th 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 of the odorous bouquets that it picks up on. So the word, in my understanding, in the human context, originally refers to an expression like a sneer, the curled lip. 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 couple of articles that had a picture of Harrison Ford doing a 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 1930s Dracula. Oh, OK. You attached a picture in the outline and I can see that he he.

He almost looks not quite human here. He looks a bit like a big cat. 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.

I didn't know about this. 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.

a pair of shoes, that sort of thing. It might also just be a little less clear what they're responding to. But generally, the idea is that they are assuming this kind of a sneer that also looks a little bit goofy and

And what they are doing is they are heightening their exposure to the odor so as to better analyze it. Interesting. So 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 in. 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 vomeronasal organ, the VNO or the Jacobson's organ. This is a chemoreception organ in the roof of the mouth. This occurs in

ungulates as well, horses and giraffes, which both smell. And in the latter example of the giraffe, they also taste the urine of mares that are in estrus. Oh, OK. Well, wait a minute. That makes me wonder if all these other mammals have a vomeronasal organ. Do we have one? Can we can we smell with the roof of our mouth like this? Humans do not, so far as anyone can apparently tell, have one of these, at least not a functional one as adults.

According to 2014's Encyclopedia of the Neurological Sciences, second edition by Moon et al., vomeronasal organs are prominent in the fetus and show up vestigially in adults, though there has apparently been a lot of back-and-forth debate over this. It seems like the majority view, though, is that while some primates have functional vomeronasal organs, mainly like New World monkeys, chimps and humans do not. Interesting.

Interesting. I'd also point out something that I saw referenced in an article is that the obviousness of the Fleming response to humans is

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 kind of a no-brainer when you drive it home like that. But, you know, some Fleming responses are really wild, like I included a photo here of a horse's Fleming response where they just look like mad demons, whereas certainly a house cat's Fleming response just looks a little bit funny.

You know, our interpretation of it doesn't doesn't actually necessarily give us 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 it's all over the place. That's interesting. I'm going to be on the lookout for it now.

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.

Well, I would like to transition to something else, but we're going to 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 Eina Onishi, James Brooks, Sota Inoue, and Shinya Yamamoto, published in Current Biology in 2025, this year. And it's called Socially Contagious Urination in Chimpanzees. So I hope that title has 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 this paper in Scientific American that I wanted to flag. This was by Megan Bartels from January 2025. So,

Apparently, the lead author on this paper, Eina Onishi, was inspired in part by the fact that humans often seem to treat urination as a social behavior. This kind 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 are out somewhere.

at 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. 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, 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 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 for even solitary urination as social, given the right technology.

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 Tsureshon, T-S-U-R-E-S-H-O-N, which refers to the phenomenon where people get up and go to the bathroom as a group. Yeah.

That would be interesting to get into. It makes me think of the various yokai traditions that involve...

the potential threats or at least that, you know, the various scary things that can occur when you go to like a dark bathroom at night by yourself. Yeah. I can't help but wonder to what extent these two things might be connected culturally. Yeah. The bathroom stall ghosts. Yeah. And there are other examples of biological activities that seem to be socially contagious. One example is yawning. Yeah.

We've all experienced this. Somebody else yawns, you see them yawn, and then you yawn yourself. Or maybe even interspecies contagious yawning, you yawn, and then your dog yawns or vice versa. 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, I'd

Have we? I actually don't remember. I don't think we have. Yawning. Yeah, that would be a good one. You know, if only to generate the responses of I can't believe they did an episode on yawning. So boring.

No, it's probably pretty exciting. Also scratching. Hey, that's exciting. What's more exciting than scratching? Scratching is contagious as well. Socially contagious scratching. You see somebody scratch, you're more likely to scratch. Yeah. Scratching could be, yeah, it could easily be its own episode as well. That one, that one gets pretty intense. Anyway. So while observing chimpanzees as a doctoral researcher at the Kyoto University Wildlife Research Center, the lead author of this paper, Onishi Onishi,

thought she observed a similar pattern of socially contagious urination among the chimpanzees. So she staged a quantitative experiment to measure whether this was really the case. The way it worked is researchers studied a group of 20 chimpanzees living in captivity at a place called Kumamoto Sanctuary in Japan, and they filmed them

and reviewed more than 600 hours of footage to meticulously track exactly when each ape urinated, 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 to pee if another ape had just peed within the past 60 seconds, and especially if that ape was very close by, within 10 feet. So you pee, I pee. Another interesting factor beyond time and proximity was social rank.

The researchers looked into whether the identity and social rank of each urinator mattered in how much, how much influence there was from one ape peeing to another ape 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 rank was an influence and

As quoted in Scientific American, Onishi 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 closeness makes the yawn more contagious. But that is not what they found. Continuing the quote from Onishi, quote,

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 be more like the boss P's IP, or maybe, you know, the cooler person P's 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 strange traits emerge in zoos or labs or sanctuaries that are not seen in wild con specifics. 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?

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 also time for you to pee. Yeah.

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 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 together.

and helps motivate 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. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, this way you're not splitting the party every time, every time this random individual wants to pee or needs to pee. Beyond establishing and maintaining social cohesion, there are a few other ideas the authors mentioned. One idea is that coordinated urination may play, to quote the paper, quote, potential roles in preparation for collective departure, i.e. voiding before long distance travel.

Uh, so, you know, parents may be familiar with this. Like, you know, we're about to go on a car trip. You need to go to the bathroom before we leave. Yeah. Yeah. This is a, this is a big one. This is a, this is a frequent, uh,

point of discussion in my household. 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 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. Hmm.

Another possible explanation that the authors mentioned could be, quote, territorial scent marking, i.e. coordination of chemosensory signals. So what's better than you individually doing a territorial scent mark with your pee, getting all your buds to mark at the same time? Well,

One can imagine that this does a number of things. It increases detectability, a la where we were talking about elevated scent marking in dogs. It's important to 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 peeing individually. And maybe also more individuals peeing would communicate more of a threat level within the collective mark.

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. 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. So anyway, chimpanzee pee-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.

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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 of having technology. And this is where we get into the field of urinalysis. Urinalysis via lab work, automated systems, and now even artificial intelligence can reveal quite a lot about a person.

Urine analysis is used to detect and manage a wide range of disorders, to check overall health, to look for particular conditions, and or to manage known conditions. Some very general prognoses can be made visually with a human urine sample, if you know what you're doing. But much in urine analysis is revealed via lab work and via machines and technology. Yeah.

This is not going to come as a shocker to many of you. We've all had to give urine samples at the doctor before, and they've given us the lab readout, and or we've paid for that lab fee 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 analysis and so forth.

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. 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, like, DNA, like,

usable DNA information is obtainable via urine sample. But 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. And if you haven't had your urine tested for work or some sort of legal process in the past, you've probably seen it on TV. I believe there's a famous episode of The Office where

that I only vaguely remember, but I know I've seen it, that involves drug testing of the office because Dwight found half a joint in the parking lot. Oh, do they have to pee for that? I don't remember. Yeah, I was trying to refresh on this. I think Michael Scott, the boss on the office, ends up getting paranoid because he once, quote, got high accidentally at an Alicia Keys concert or something.

And so he's like, he's like trying to pressure Dwight into giving him some clean urine that he can use. Yeah. But though it is 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, of a drug test.

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's the attempt to do this, and I've seen this particular plot point come up in other shows as well, we did mention another option that has certainly entered the market over the past many years, and that is the use of synthetic human urine.

This 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. Wow. 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 on the website mayoclinicproceedings.org, and they point out that German chemist Friedrich Wohler, who lived 1800 to 1882, was the first to produce synthetic urine, synthetic human urine, back in 1828. 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 just the P-fraud. Absolutely. Yeah, this was not for a truck test. Wohler 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, 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. And so that was kind of like the broad call for synthetic urine at the time. But there's this entire additional layer to Frederick Wilder's contribution here as well. So his synthesis of human urea without the aid of a human kidney

proved that organic compounds could 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 argued 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 something beyond our science in that body that is making the substance in question.

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.

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 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. And it comes from a dog or it comes from some other animal. And that is what I'm reading. And in the idea that you could fake that is just, you know, abysmal.

P is vitalistic poetry. Yeah. 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. Mm hmm.

So again, coming back to today, yes, you can buy synthetic urine in various places, either for legitimate medical testing purposes, educational purposes, but also products that seem to be intended just for the duping of drug tests.

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? 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, you know, clinical usage versus things that are marketed for the duping of drug tests. Uh-huh.

I think it's 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 90s. 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, 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 dupe a 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 was reading some sources here that were 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 urine looks clean, but it's also obviously purchased at the local smoke shop. This is the evolutionary arms race in the synthetic urine and the drug tests. 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, there's probably a similar discussion to be made around, say, AI-generated literature, you know? Mm-hmm.

Where, you know, someone might say, well, how could you possibly be fooled by this? Like, clearly it was written by a machine and so forth. Like, the dogs probably have a very low, would have a very, like, low estimation of synthetic urines and, like, what it's telling them. Though I guess that's a whole topic unto itself that we're not really going to get into today. Like, to what degree is

does synthetic urine fool animals that have these heightened senses to understand it. 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 right. It would maybe be more like, 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 animal urines. Oh.

Wait a minute. Could this be for scent marking fraud, essentially, carried out by humans? 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...

You have in the past used actual deer urine to say, you know, bait a buck, that sort of 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 in deer. Ah, okay. Yeah, because to come back to urine in general, like urine, healthy human urine, 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. 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, say, predator urine. So you synthesize, there's not really a cougar in the area, but you put cougar pee out there and it's supposedly it will keep away the pest animals that you don't want in your garden or whatever.

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, a fox or a bear or whatever the predator happens to be.

And then there are cases where they're making a point of it being synthetic animal urine. I can't speak to how efficient these are. But, you know, coming back to our dog example, if they are efficient enough to, like, 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. Right.

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 medical equipment and tests and educational purposes as well. But you can also buy synthetic chimpanzee urine for the same purpose.

because, of course, the study of chimpanzee physiology and chimpanzee biological responses is vitally important for human medicine as well. But is it cheaper than the synthetic human urine? And if so, would somebody trying to pass a drug test save a few bucks and get the chimpanzee urine instead? Ooh!

Well, let's check real quick. Um, I'll pull up the website. Um, okay. I'm looking at the cost 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 feel like they would catch you if you try to use chimp urine to, uh, synthetic chimp urine to pass a, like a work drug test. Uh,

But also, I should add that you're probably I'm thinking most of the people trying to pass a drug test using synthetic urine, they're probably not buying it from a biomedical company. They're buying it like at the local smoke shop or something from some other supplier, which I'm assuming are ultimately not the same corporation. Listeners, if anybody in the audience has ever tried to spoof a drug test by using like cougar urine or something like that.

Let us know how that went. Did it work? Yeah, or in general, if there are people out there who have experience using synthetic animal urines either to attract or drive away organisms, ride 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 where the science is in terms of making 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. Oh, and hey, we also, you 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? Yeah, absolutely.

All right. On that note, we're going to go and close out this episode. But yeah, right in. We'd love to hear from everyone. Just a reminder that 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.

Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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