This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

Again, we're on vacation this week.

So, you've got P-mail, part three of three, airing right now, originally published, 522, 2025. What more

could you possibly want? New episodes? Well, we'll have this for you next week. Hope you enjoy.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

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.

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 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 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 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 kinds of information that we know dogs do share with each other through urine, but also about how much there is to this

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