At least, it's contagious among a group of captive chimpanzees at the Kumamoto Sanctuary. How do researchers know? A very dedicated grad student at Kyoto University. In the quest for scientific knowledge, Ena Onishi logged over 600 hours in the field! This episode, host Regina G. Barber and special guests Jonathan Lambert and Ari Shapiro get into the nitty gritty of the research and their hypotheses for why this is happening in this episode.Read Jonathan's full reporting about contagious peeing in chimps.Delighted by other scientific discoveries you think we should share with the whole class (the rest of our audience)? Let us know by emailing [email protected]!Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Thank you. Excited to be here on my first News Roundup with y'all.
We are totally excited to have you. And we're also excited to have a News Roundup favorite, Ari Shapiro, one of the hosts of All Things Considered. Welcome back.
I only came because I heard you were going to be here, John.
Okay, so we're going to do what we usually do. We're going to go over three science stories in the news. The first one being what, John?
Contagious peeing in chimps. Need I say any more? No, please don't.
And not only do we have peeing chimps, but we're also going to get chirping chorus waves from space.
I love chirps. And space. And better vegan cheese. We really contain multitudes.
We totally do. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Chapter 2: What did Ena Onishi discover about chimpanzees?
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Okay, Ari, where do you want to start today?
Let's start with contagious peeing among chips. Sorry, it's NPR. We should say urination. Contagious urination. What is going on?
Yeah, okay. So to put this in context, have you ever heard of contagious yawning? Yeah, totally. Like if I yawn, you get the urge to yawn too? Yes.
Yeah, I'm holding back the yawn right now. So Ina Onishi, a grad student at Kyoto University in Japan, was studying a group of captive chimpanzees when something similar struck her as odd.
I noticed that they seem to have a tendency to urinate around the same time. And it kind of reminded me of some human behaviors of going to bathroom together, for example.
So like the same effect is making chimps pee together that makes us yawn in sequence? Yeah.
So this observation got Ina wondering if this behavior might be socially contagious like yawning. And to see if it was, she spent more than 600 hours watching a group of 20 chimpanzees.
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Chapter 3: How does social hierarchy affect chimp behavior?
To see when they pee? She had to track every time one of them relieved themselves?
Yeah, and she said that it was easier to hear them pee than to see them pee. But so she noted when each individual chimp peed and where they were relative to each other. And looking at the data altogether, an interesting pattern emerged.
Chapter 4: What could be the evolutionary advantages of contagious urination?
So basically chimps were peeing together a bit more often than you'd expect if they were just peeing at random. And she published that conclusion in the journal Current Biology this week. Could she tell why this was happening? So being closer helped, but proximity wasn't like the main factor here.
Chimps have a hierarchical society, and it turns out that the lower ranking chimps were more likely to catch the urge to pee from more dominant chimps.
So when my boss pees, I'm going to pee? Yeah, maybe.
And they don't know why this is. It could just be that lower ranking chimps are paying closer attention to higher ranking ones. But that's just one possibility.
OK, so there's clearly more to study here. But is there any evolutionary reason that contagious urination would be an advantage?
One idea is that doing the same thing together just kind of helps a group sync up, which could help them operate better as a unit. If this happens in the wild, it might help the chimps avoid predators who get attracted by the smell of pee by concentrating it all in one spot.
But we can't rule out that there might be like a non-adaptive reason. It could be just that the chimps pee when they hear other chimps pee, sort of like humans get the urge when you hear like running water.
Okay, let's move on from that one. Tell me about our second story, A Chorus in Space.
Yeah, so there are these things called chorus waves. Do you want to hear?
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Chapter 5: What are chorus waves and why are they significant?
But the surprising thing is they actually observe it and they see these waves in this region, which is kind of unexpected. It changes our ideas a little bit.
So that's Richard Horn, a professor and distinguished research scientist at the British Antarctic Survey on Space Weather. He wasn't part of the study, but he said the study might change how scientists think course waves are created.
How so?
Well, the leading hypothesis on how chorus waves are created suggests that gradients in the Earth's magnetic field are very important, and that as chorus waves grow, they should cause bunching of electrons.
But here's the complication. This study, for the first time, found chorus waves further out, where Earth's magnetic field is much weaker and non-uniform. And yet the waves were growing and the electrons were still bunched, so the magnetic field gradient did not seem to be that important.
I'm sure Brian Eno is going to make a record with these waves any day now. But if I'm not Brian Eno, why should I care about this?
Right. I mean, legit question. Electrons create these waves and then the waves themselves affect the electrons. It's like a feedback loop. Coarse waves can actually like push these electrons to move nearly the speed of light.
And these extremely fast particles can disrupt electrical components that are aboard so many communication satellites and can damage spacecraft too. So understanding how chorus waves are created is important to our everyday lives.
Okay, shall we make another really hard pivot from chorus waves in space to vegan cheese? What's up with the vegan cheese?
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