When most of us hit a certain age, urination stops being a thing we find funny.

But that doesn’t mean urination  can’t still be fascinating. Especially when you look beyond the pee coming out of human bodies to the  rest of the animal kingdom.

Because peeing does a lot  more than get rid of waste. It can help lobsters find love. It  can help dogs lie to each other.

It can even help monkeys avoid getting sick. We’ve got six examples of weird animal  urination habits for you, today. So take a quick bathroom break if  you need to, and we’ll get started. [♪INTRO] Okay I did say that peeing does  a lot more than get rid of waste.

But let’s start there for a quick reminder. Your kidneys help keep you alive  by performing a variety of to-dos, like flushing out toxins, and  balancing your blood chemistry. Producing urine, which you then excrete, is how they accomplish all those tasks.

And this kind is more or less the  same across a lot of different kinds of animals, including some that  you might not think of… like fish. That’s right. Fish pee!

Presumably,  none of them ever get grossed out about constantly swimming in  their own diluted urine stream. Some fish species have an opening  that expels both liquid and solid waste. Others have a  specialized pee hole just like we do.

But fish have another way to expel their waste. Specifically, they can flush excess  salt and nitrogen out via their gills. Which is a handy dandy  adaptation if ever there was one.

And with that little demo  out of the way, let’s move onto an animal that uses its pee to say something. You know, without writing its  name in the snow or whatever. Lots of animals use pheromones to  attract and assess potential mates.

These are chemicals that animals emit to send signals to other members of their species. And lobsters release their pheromones  via, you guessed it, their pee. A lobsters’ bladder is located in  its head, just underneath its brain.

And it pees via pores at the base of its antennas. I know this might sound like an evolutionary disaster that life simply found a way around. But if you’re a lobster, peeing out  your head is actually useful if you spend most of your time backed into  your little lobster burrow tail-first!

It also gives you a quick way to communicate with other lobsters in the area around you. Special glands mix pheromones into  the urine before it’s released, and that urine stream can travel  up to seven feet through the water! A lobster can send a message via pee a Shaquille O’Neal length distance away.

Male lobsters use these pee pheromones to intimidate other male  lobsters and attract females. In which case, the female then takes her turn. When she shows up, she pees in the male’s face, using her own pheromones  to tell him to cool it with the aggression and let her into  his burrow so they can mate.

She also sends signals to any other females in the area that this male is  spoken for. At least for now. The female will stick around for a few weeks, and then the pair will split  up and move onto new mates.

That’s right. Apologies to fans of the sitcom Friends, but lobsters do not mate for life. But instead of leaving you with  that bummer of a correction, how about something more  hopeful: humans have found a use for lobster urine,  too.

Just not for romance. Scientists in Florida have found that  lobster pee repels coral-eating snails, helping protect sensitive coral reefs from damage! So the ocean is full of weird urination  habits.

But so are the rivers. Between 2014 and 2018, a group of  scientists observed male Amazon river dolphins sending streams of  pee arcing into the air 36 times. During these, quote, “aerial  urination events”, the males would turn themselves upside down, stick their penises out of the water, and let loose.

But… why? Why not just pee into the water, since  it’s going to end up there anyway?! The scientists who witnessed  this behavior noted that, not long after given event,  another male dolphin usually approached and stuck his snout  into the stream of urine.

Marine mammals generally don’t  have much of a sense of smell, but the researchers inferred  maybe river dolphins have sensory receptors on their snouts that  let them detect pheromones and other chemicals in each other’s urine. And since river dolphins have  bristles on their snouts that we mostly think are for sensing  movement and vibrations in the water, the researchers also proposed  that maybe these bristles could be involved in picking  up chemical signals as well. In other words, these aerial  pee streams could be a form of chemical communication that  males use to assert their dominance over each other, kind  of like with the horny lobsters.

However, another expert on mammal senses chimed in with some skepticism. In his response, published in the  same journal a few months later, he says there’s no anatomical  evidence that the dolphin’s snout bristles can sense chemicals or smells. In fact, there’s no mammal that we know of that has sensory bristles that work like that.

Instead, this scientist thinks  the dolphins could be playing. Or they could just like sticking their penises out of the water while swimming on their backs, and the whole peeing part  could just be a coincidence. When you gotta go, you gotta go.

Even if you’re gonna confuse  some hairless apes whose brains love finding patterns in  data that aren’t really there. Now, we do know that members  of another dolphin species, the bottlenose dolphin, can recognize  each other from urine samples. So river dolphin pee communication  isn’t completely out of left field.

But the jury’s still out on this one. All that research will need funding,  and so do we. So here’s an ad: This SciShow video is supported by Zocdoc!

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Head to zocdoc.com/SCISHOW to get started and check that appointment off your to-do list. Up next: monkeys. A lot of monkey species do this thing called urine washing.

As in, they appear to wash  themselves with their own urine. And I’m not talking casually letting  a little pee trickle down their legs. They actively pee on their hands and then rub it on themselves, or sometimes each other.

The obvious question is once again  “Why?!” Much like our river dolphin mystery, scientists don’t know.  But there are several hypotheses. It could be another example  of animals sending signals to each other via chemicals  and scents in their pee. But it could also have nothing  to do with communication.

Monkeys might pee on themselves  just to cool themselves off. This is something other animals do, like birds. Okay technically birds don’t  pee in the traditional sense.

It comes out at the same time as their poop, out their one-stop-shop hole called a cloaca. Or maybe, urine washing helps monkeys spread parasite-fighting chemicals from  plants or bugs over their skin. In addition to urine washing,  a lot of monkeys do something called anointing, where they rub things like leaves, fruit, mud, and insects on themselves.

Some monkeys like to combine  this with urine washing, so some primatologists  speculate that if anointing is a way of self-medicating against  parasites, then urine could help them apply the antiparasitic  compounds to all the right body parts. But it’s also possible that urine  washing could improve a monkey’s grip. In a study of wild white-faced  capuchins in Costa Rica, the monkeys did more urine-washing in dry weather, especially when they were near fruit trees.

The researchers proposed  this could mean the monkeys were rubbing pee on their hands  and feet to make them sticky, so they could get a better  grip on the dry tree branches. As you can see, different  studies have backed up different possible explanations for urine-washing  in different monkey species. So it’s possible it has multiple purposes.

Whatever they are, I’ll stick to  washing my hands with soap and water. We’re not done with the urination  habits of our primate cousins. Because in chimpanzees, it seems  that peeing might be contagious.

You know, like a human yawn. In 2025, researchers studying a group of chimps at a wildlife sanctuary in  Japan reported that when one chimp started to pee, others  were likely to follow suit. Specifically, a second chimp was more  likely to pee if it was physically closer to the initial urinator,  and if it was lower in social rank.

This isn’t exactly like  contagious yawning, though. Some studies have suggested humans are more likely to “catch” a yawn from  someone we feel close to. But in this chimpanzee population,  two chimps being buddies did not make it more likely that one would  follow the other’s lead when peeing.

The researchers who documented this  case of this “social urination” hope their work will spur more research,  because this is apparently the first time anyone has collected data on this  phenomenon in any animal species. Or should I say any non-human animal species. Because we’ve got plenty of  anecdotal evidence that humans sometimes like to take bathroom breaks in groups… even if they’re for completely  different reasons than other primates.

Sometimes we even leave each other messages on the walls of the bathroom stalls. Which brings me to our final  entry for this list show. Like many other animals, dogs use scent marking to leave messages for each other.

They urinate on objects in their  environment, and other dogs can smell what’s left to learn about the urinater’s  size, social status, and so forth. But according to a paper published in 2018, dogs could use their pee  to lie about who they are. See, one way dogs and other  scent-marking animals make themselves stand out is by  elevating their scent marks.

Peeing on elevated or vertical  surfaces helps keep the smells from getting lost among  other scents on the ground, and places them closer to nose-level,  which is far more convenient. Across multiple species, males are more likely to elevate their scent marks than females. And data from mongooses and  pandas shows that animals of both sexes spend more time sniffing  around higher scent marks.

Basically, they’re interested  in big, competitive males that may be lurking around, for different reasons. Now, researchers used to think that  scent marks were what’s called an honest signal, conveying accurate  information about the urinater. But a 2012 paper found that  small male mongooses were leaving higher scent marks than  expected, relative to their size.

In other words, it seemed like they were pretending to be bigger than they really were. This brings us back to dogs. For that 2018 paper, researchers studied scent  marking by adult male dogs at two animal shelters in New York  State to figure out whether these dogs were using their  pee to lie about their size.

They found that bigger dogs typically  left higher urine marks, meaning yes, other dogs can get information  on the urinator's size from this. But, they also found that small  dogs were raising their legs higher, to get their pee higher relative  to their height, than large dogs. But as much as they were trying  to lie… as much as dogs are capable of lying, anyway…they  can’t be completely dishonest.

The chemicals in their urine  contain messages as well, and those wouldn’t change. The researchers think this particular  kind of fibbing helps small dogs avoid conflict with other males,  rather than to attract females. Unfortunately, we have not  found the dog equivalent of rounding up to 6 feet  tall on your dating profile.

However, this study did have a few limitations. For example, the team didn’t  control for the fact that sometimes dogs intentionally try to pee onto a  mark left by a previous dog, or that really big dogs can’t lift their legs too  high or they risk losing their balance. But they definitely think those  little dogs are up to something.

And the next time you take your dog out to potty, just be glad your dog doesn't pee out of his face. [♪OUTRO]