You're listening to Weird and Dead, the paleontology podcast
that tells evolutions most embarrassing and bizarre
stories. I'm Megan Wetherell.
And I'm Amy Atwater, and we're two living scientists who are
weirdly excited about dead things.
We started season 3 with an episode about urine, which ended
with a terrible life altering reveal from Amy that some
turtles piss out of their mouths.
Megan then had a full on crash out about it that we recorded
for Patreon. And we are now releasing it as a
holiday gift for you. Horrible turtle facts for
everybody. Speaking of Patreon, did you
know that there is more than an entire season of full length
exclusive episodes over there? You can binge them all for a
mere $5 a month at patreon.com/weird and Dead
Podcast. As always, we are disgusting,
and on Patreon we feel even more confident about being more
disgusting, so pay close attention to the content
warnings in the description. You brought up at the first
episode of this season, Amy, that there is a turtle that can
piss through its mouth and that you didn't have time to really
look into it. But that just blew my God damn
mind. So I.
Blew that turtle's mouth. I did not find the one paper
from the 1880s that I really wanted to.
I didn't have time to do that. But So what I will say is
regarding that paper and regarding this paper, the paper
that you read and talked about, or at least that you.
Skimmed briefly skimmed enough to be like, is this, is this?
I was like, it's legit enough I'm mentioning it.
Oh, yeah, no, it's, it's legit. And actually, the more that I
read about their research methods, which I will be
summarizing for you today 'cause they are funny to think about,
they, they did a very thorough job.
But what is funny to me is so this paper is from 2012.
It has 19 citations, most of which are the same author
publishing slightly different experiments on turtle
mouthpissing. My career, my legacy, yes.
And then like weird like pop science articles that are
somehow getting picked up by Google Scholar as citations.
So like there has not been people have not lurked, looked
into other turtles. Opportunity.
Let me tell you a little bit about the history of what the
fuck is going on with this turtle.
So First off, this turtle is I think it just had a rename for
the genus. It's like trionics and it's
synesis synonesis, whatever. It's the Chinese soft.
Shell Trionics is soft shell, right?
We had those in Texas, yeah. And it's apparently the world's
most economically important turtle because it's eaten a lot.
This is like pigeons. Yes, it is just the turtle of
pigeons. Yeah, or the pigeons of turtles.
So yes, it's pretty well studied, but when in the very
introduction of this 2012 paper, they talk about the fact that
we've known since about the 1880s that something was fucked
up with this turtle. The way you keep saying this
really makes it sound like it's one individual turtle like this.
Like this one creepy fucker. The reason I really wanted to
find this paper is because I cannot at this point in time
exclude that it is at least just one species of this, of turtles
like it. This 1880s paper said that they,
we noticed that it has these little dingly danglies in the
mouth and throat of this species of turtle and a few soft shelled
turtles. So maybe there are some other
species, but it seems to only be this particular species that
people are studying it in, presumably because it's
economically valuable. And so it's easy to access, it's
easy to get. They're the the laboratory baths
of turtles of soft. Shelled turtles.
I'm sorry, Trionics, that's. Pretty easy to acquire one of
these turtles, I guess I I did want to see what these looked
like. Yeah.
And so I did go and I found a paper that finally has an image.
And before you Scroll down, I want you to tell me what you
envision. I mean, in your head to back up,
to back up, in case you didn't listen to that episode.
I guess these are called bucopharyngeal viliform
processes. Fancy.
These turtles excrete urine through their mouths.
More about that later, but they use these little dingley danglia
to do so. Now, given that, what were you
envisioning? Will you mean of inside their
throat or the whole Organism? I mean not of the turtle.
I I know what a turtle looks like, but what did you think
that the. I guess I thought it looks like
maybe like the inside of a cave with a bunch of stalagmites and
stalagtites, kind of like growing from or like whatever
your little dingly dangly is just like but like multiplied by
like 100. How many by how many?
I guess when I was really no, no, I think in my mind's eye
when I thought about this turtle pissing through its mouth, I
almost kind of thought of them as like utters inside their
mouth. So maybe like I don't know, 10
would be my like picture. That's what I was envisioning
for sure, was about 10 flesh stalactites hanging down from
the roof of the mouth. OK, so go to the image you can
Scroll down, it's the only one. I deserve this.
I deserve every bit of this after the pigeon fiasco.
I don't like it. Why don't you?
Describe what you see on the right first.
I mean, that looks like the shit taking over the animals and
creatures and Princess Mononoke. Like they're covered in these
like creepy, wormy fleshy things that are very dense.
And it's like almost like a fur, but it's like you can tell it's
like fleshy and gross, but it seems to be quite fine, you
know, like a hair kind of texture there.
And yeah, I mean, or, or even kind of like, you know how like
an an enemy or like a starfish will kind of cling to you with
their creepy little tube fingery things kind of like that, yeah.
OK so now in the panel on the left the the letter L is for
lower jaw and the T stands for tongue to give you an ideal of
scale. So how these things are hair
hair size? They are they hair size and hair
density? Like if I opened a turtle's
mouth for whatever reason, I don't know why I would, but if I
did and I saw this, I would assume it had a mold.
Infestation, I could see that I could see that it it or yeah, it
was it was sprouting straight up hairs or something like that.
I would not think it was. Well, that would definitely be a
conclusion was. No, you would think it.
You're sick. Yeah.
You poor. Yes, Yeah, it does.
It kind of looks like, I mean, it looks like like little
bacteria kind of sprouting off of everything, right?
Yeah, I think I was also envisioning kind of like what we
see in the the cloacas of turtles that do a lot of butt
breathing, like right, you know, it's.
More intricate caverns. Yes, more caverns, less, less
fuzz. Yes, very fine.
Yeah, like it just swallowed a hairball.
It's it is the hair, It is the hair and it's going down the
throat like it's eucopharyngeal. It's not, it doesn't tip of the
mouth. It's going down into the back of
the back of the mouth, beginning of the throat.
Yeah, pretty foul. Puffed soft.
Remarkably, they didn't say. I would assume so.
Beautiful piss fibers. Yeah, yeah.
So you said piss fibers, but initially when these were
discovered and reported, of course nobody knew what the fuck
they were for. But people had recently started
to theorize that turtles were butt breathing.
So if you can butt breathe, why not mouth breathe?
You know, the regular way. Except just, I guess not all of
the way. Oh, so butt breathing is what
inspired us to look in the mouth.
We started with the butt. I mean, at least it's what
inspired us to look at these things and be like, that's not
an infection that probably serves an evolutionary purpose.
What is the purpose? So some things that have been
theorized have been OK, well, they're really vascular.
Like it's just such a gross description.
It is for. Throat fibers, yeah.
Yeah, I don't like that. It's nasty.
So OK, maybe they're for respiratory use.
Maybe they're for regulating salt in water.
You know, like getting rid of it, adding it, whatever a turtle
needs to fucking do. Salt, Martha Stewart.
A little more salt, yeah? I don't know at what point they
started to think. I think that's for piss.
I wasn't able to track down that particular thought process, but
I was able to track down that at around the 1990s they started to
notice some weird behavioral patterns in this turtle.
So in about the 1990s a paper emerges saying why the fuck are
these turtles gargling? My God.
Like why do they gargle the water?
That seems a little odd. Mint tea, fresh breath.
Yeah, kind of right. Like so.
Nope, the. Opposite.
The fucking opposite. What was the way?
Yeah. So they noticed that they're
they're doing, they're gargling, they're moving their throat in
and out, and they're really only doing it in the water, like
they're not doing it out of the water.
And they notice that they do it way more when you take them and
you don't come and physically hold them in the water.
So if you immerse the turtle again manually, yeah, you, you
get a lot more. My God.
Shocking. Well, right.
Isn't that pretty normal? Right.
You're like, I'm straight. I'm like making you drown like
this. Of course, that's like, I yeah,
this is OK all right, All right. Not focusing on the why,
focusing on the how and the and the science.
Yep. Not the humans.
So in 2012, these authors
decided to, I don't know where they got the piss theory from,
but they decided to test the piss theory, that this was
actually an adaptation for getting rid of urea.
Yeah. My RIA.
And okay, so at this point I have two pathways for you as far
as how you would like this information presented to you and
to the rest of the world. Oh, OK.
I thought it was going to be like how I'd like my urine to
leave my body and. I mean, so that's option one.
OK, option one is let's, let's talk first about.
I couldn't decide what was the best way to present this
information. So option one is let's pause and
before we learn about turtles being strapped to tables.
Which? Sorry, everybody, it's a funny
visual. We're going to go.
And it is. They're, they're, they're fine.
They did. I don't know they did, but
anyways, okay, so the other so the first option is let's go
down the the weird channel that leads us to veganism or we can
talk more about this experiment. I think let's go veganism first.
We'll come. Okay, experiment.
All right, I guess I'd love to know how this is all.
Veganism then cruelty. Aren't those like?
Kind of the same. I mean, you know, not the same
not but you know, related. Same body of ideas.
Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about urea.
So I at one point in my life for OMSI I witnessed a shark
dissection. That's the Oregon Way.
And I think they must have hit the bladder because all of a
sudden the world became unbelievably foul smelling.
Like the shark didn't smell great before.
But then we had a whole bunch of what was ammonia.
Yeah, release. Right.
And that confused me for a long time because I thought from then
on we peed ammonia. We do not.
We are not ammonia. Person I love that though.
I love your like empathy. You were just like the shark.
We are one, we are the same. Yeah, which like, I've smelled
my own piss on a regular basis, Kind of hard to avoid.
It's not like I'm trying to do it deliberately.
But ammonia, That's not what my pee smells like.
Because my pee, like your pee, is urea.
I don't pee ammonia ammonia super poisonous, super toxic.
That doesn't mean that you don't your body doesn't make it.
It does it's a waste product, but it does mean that if we were
pissing ammonia in order to safely get it out of our bodies,
we would have to be consuming way more water because you
really have to dilute ammonia to safely remove it from your body
without I don't know. I don't know what it would do
burn through your ear burning everything.
So we've got animals with P ammonia are almost entirely
aquatic. So things like sharks and fish.
That's why sometimes if you have fish in a fish tank, you have to
be careful about the nitrogen levels.
And when they say nitrogen levels, they're talking about.
Ammonia. Right, because that could be why
all goldfish die. But exactly so with humans and
mammals, we pee urea out. So we actually take it and we
process it. Most of that transformation
process happens in the liver to get rid of the ammonia.
It goes into some byproducts and then our kidneys turn it into
urea and we excrete it. And that's important because
that means that the mouth pissing it is pissing out mostly
urea. And so it's taking kind of the
the function of the kidneys. It is kidney hair, not liver
hair in this. I'm just, this is super
fascinating because in like pregnancy you have to be
monitoring kidney function a lot.
Like I had preeclampsia and then full blown eclampsia and that's
like also related to kidney function.
And like you're just like overwhelming your kidneys with,
I think you're, I don't quite remember.
I just know it could kill you. But so it's just very, yeah,
it's just like, OK, so different pathways of dealing with your
waste products. Yes, now there is 1/3 pathway
and this is the pathway of a lot of reptiles, turns out.
Not turtles, I guess, or at least not these turtles.
But they take it and they make it into uric acid, so they
concentrate it even further. That's why you get the slurry,
as we've discussed in the. Right.
Or we talked about the Komodo dragon cocaine poop.
That's like, I don't know if that's uric acid or if it's all
the calcium in the bones that they eat, but they just have
like poop. The urine is like powder.
Yeah, I think it's it's mostly the calcium because not all
other reptiles do that. But yeah, so uric acid, it does.
It's very white and it makes kind of like for birds, it's the
white component of the bird. Poop that's in the scat rap.
The scat rap song I remember. Yeah, park your car in a by
something or a field getting scat on your window shield full
of seeds. Shield.
Wow. Something why you got bombed by
a bird in flight. I know the whole thing girl,
Don't. Don't even.
Don't even test it. Never memorized that.
So the whole thing really excited, yeah.
Down by the cheek on a hollow log scat full of berries.
Bones of a frog up last night he was up the moon hunting.
Craw dies. It was Mr. Raccoon.
Oh God. Yeah.
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I, I did go down a little bit of a separate rabbit hole because I
didn't want to figure out if Google AI was correct or not,
which of course it was not. It was more of a kangaroo rat
shaped rabbit hole because I was like, oh, OK, well, kangaroo
rats do a lot of concentration. Are they actually turning it
into uric acid and that's how they're peeing it out?
And no, turns out they just have hyper concentrated urea.
So they are still using urea. Oh, and that's the, that's the
other issue. So if you're going from urea to
your uric acid, you are. Again, uric acid is
metabolically harder to make, so it takes more steps.
You burn more ATP, you're burning more energy to make it.
But it does require less water to get rid of because it is less
toxic. So it's like the path of poison
is basically from ammonia. OK, that's not so bad.
But if you're in water. But if you're not in water, you
need to use less water to get rid of it.
So then you get urea. Urea can again be kind of toxic,
so you do have to use some water to dilute it and the uric acid
you need even less to dilute it. So kangaroo rats have just taken
a completely different route to make their urine so hyper
concentrated and use less water. I don't know exactly what their
route is, but I know they are pissing urea, not uric acid.
Little crystals. Little urea crystals.
There's probably some uric acid. I mean, we also have some uric
acid in our bodies. That's how you get gout is a
build up of uric acid, but primarily we're urea.
Let's talk about how this somehow.
Relates to veganism. As I was looking up ammonia and
urea and trying to figure out what the fuck the difference is
and why my piss doesn't smell like shark piss, I, I realized
that like, OK, this is nitrogenous waste.
This is nitrogen based waste. That's the sort of stuff you put
on your plants. Again, I have to like, I'm
trying to like increase my crop yield of grass for my animals.
So I've been reading a lot about like crazy things I could be
doing to my 20 acres of grass in order to encourage grass growth
and remove rushes. And one of them was like
nitrogen and increasing your fertilizer and little.
Right. Which, like my animals poop out
there all the time because they're not fertilizing.
Right. So I was like, oh, OK, piss.
Do people use piss as fertilizer?
And that's how we get to veganism.
OK, I I do love you. I don't understand anything
that's happening right now. Yep.
OK, so I and I don't know fully why but so this is.
Is this like bat guano? Is that like related to all this
anyway? I mean, bat guano is potentially
fertilizer, but when I went and I looked up, OK, how do you use
urea? Can you just pee on your fields?
The first thing that came up was a site talking all about how to
use pee for your garden. And it was, of course.
From hippies. From Hippie.
Vegans. Of course, I visited many of
these farms in Eugene. They are horrifying.
Yeah, they smell like piss. Yeah, I am shit.
Human shit. Yeah, good for you.
So I don't know 100% if the reason that this vegan, I don't
know if it was just this one vegan webpage that was like,
yeah, everybody pissed on your plants or if they were looking
for ways to increase their crop yield that didn't rely.
On fertilizer from animals, right?
Because they're vegans. So if you're using poop from
cows. They won't even use fertilizer.
Well, that's still encouraging the market for cows.
I mean, but probably. Fine market if all you're doing
is waiting for poop, but. Shouldn't we use all parts of
the cow I just? I I don't know, I don't know if
that's how they got there. I don't know actually how
fertilizer is made. Maybe there's other animal
byproduct parts in it. I.
OK, so that kind of OK, I can, I can I can see the connection
between OK, all right, all right, sure.
Yeah, so I want you to know that down on this website they did
have, even though they didn't talk about why the fuck they
were getting to pee in the 1st place.
I mean I guess it is something you have on hand.
They had a whole subtitle said is this even vegan?
Because it's human and. They say, sort of.
My my God. It depends on how you use it and
how you look at it. Using human urine isn't a plant
based technique, so in its purest form it can't be
considered plant based growing. Humans are animals, right?
Yeah. But on the other hand, it's
yours, so you know if you're being manipulated into making.
Right, if it's cruelty or not, I mean, yeah, I do like to pee
outside. So I mean, that would be nice.
Well, if you would like me to come to your farm and pee on
your your crops, I'd be more than happy to.
So the the subtitles on this website were some of the most
bizarre, like just mental tangents that are clearly
related but are just not things that would have come up for me
and thinking about this stuff. And yeah, they had, they said
studies conducted in Sweden and then they listed 2 paper like
citations. But then they never gave us the
rest of the papers. So I don't know if these are
real papers or if they, just like Google AI came up with.
Some 90s papers show that an adult's urine contains enough
nutrients to fertilize 50 to 100% of the crops needed to feed
one adult. They are not putting a number on
how much urine. I don't know if that means we
need to pee a full year. Right.
Or this is this feels vague, this feels I have a lot of
questions about all of those, Yes, of those numbers, yes.
Yeah, so you can pee and use urine.
They had a using urine or using pee.
A how to guide. OK, keep in mind that urine is
high in nitrogen. Well, yeah, no shit.
That's why we're using it. You may need to pee daily, but
your plants don't need your daily pee.
I'm sorry, pee daily. I pee way more than once a day.
I that's actually. A good point.
Maybe you wouldn't if you were a vegan.
If you only pee once a day, there is something wrong.
You need to go to a doctor and drink some fucking water.
OK, so you shouldn't be dousing the same plants with urine every
day. That's what the point is.
Yes, yeah, in part because you can over fertilize plants and it
can it can burn them essentially.
So you can kill plants that way. As a basic premise, the urine
must be mixed with carbon rich materials in order for the
nitrogen to become accessible to the plants.
So that includes things like leaves, straw, or just good
quality earthy soil. So if you don't have any carbon
in your soil, your nitrogen probably isn't.
I'm going to do. Too much.
OK Chemistry. OK.
Yeah, OK. So to avoid the problems of too
much nitrogen and to make sure that it is readily accessible to
the plants their first recipe, this is option #1.
I love that it's a recipe. Grab a reclaimed plastic
container and take a peek. Has to be re diluted.
By the way, can we talk about that plastic was made out of oil
products? But that's totally cool anyway,
sorry. That is technically, you know,
maybe old animals. Well, it's mostly old plants,
but. It's also fucking animals.
It's foraminifera forever ago. So just saying Foraminifera.
Yeah, just fucking saying. Yeah, plastic's not vegan.
Upset the industry. So then you dilute it with eight
to 10 parts of water and apply it to the soil.
Easy peasy. So yeah, you have to piss just a
little bit into your plastic container and dilute it a lot
with water. Oh my God, this is just
bringing. Back this is safe so.
Many pregnancy memories. So many pregnancy oh, OMSI 20
the urine, urine. Oh yeah, so many times I got
peed on in the John Day River. Oh, I was just thinking of like
long drives, like the counselors talking about all of the times
that they've had, like all the male counselors, like bragging.
About peeing in mountain. Bottles for some reason.
Yeah. Yeah.
Your brother's generation was fucking weird.
Yeah. Well, he still is.
It's still, it's still a problem.
Yeah, But no, I mean, I don't know if I told, I'm sure I did
at the time. I have pictures of it because I
was like, I have to document this not of me peeing.
But again, I was pre eclamptic in pregnancy and now I'm
remembering it has to do with like protein in your urine,
which is not good because it means that your kidneys aren't
able to like process everything. And it's a byproduct.
And it's like overdoing it for your kidneys.
And they couldn't quite get like a good sample because I over
nine months could never manage to pee in a cup sufficiently
apparently. And like, you know, you go in
for your well every single time you have a checkup when you're
pregnant, you the first thing they make you do is pee in a
cup. And I just like I, I have never,
I've never mastered that. It is just a fucking mess.
It is just like, oh OK, Like it is just.
You, you do you. Hold the cup to you.
That's that's been. Hey you know I think I tried a
lot of methods your. Crotch.
I just, I'll tell you it just never, I never got used to it
and I peed on my hands a lot. And so apparently like my pee
samples were pretty inconclusive.
And so they finally were like, OK, well we can't tell.
So you have to do a 24 hour urine collection and we will
then analyze all of that pee. So I had this little thing that
I had to put in the toilet before I peed.
I had to take it with me everywhere because also when
you're pregnant, you pee all the time.
And then you could like pour it into these jugs and I quickly
was like, mother fuckers, I don't you didn't give me enough
jugs. Like I was peeing so much.
So by the end of the 24 hours I had like I think about 3
gallons, like Oh my God. And I have this picture of me
just holding up my urine jugs with just like 24 hours of piss.
And I don't even, I think even that they were like, it's kind
of inconclusive. I mean, the conclusion was I, I
was like, not going to let these motherfuckers induce me.
I was, I was still induced, but he was at least past his due
date by the time I finally, they didn't really give me a choice
at that point. They're like, we're not letting
you go. But I was just like, he's
fucking fine. Stop it that you guys are
stressing me out. That's why I just can't pee in a
cup. Let's go back off.
But so, yeah, this is just reminding me of all the time.
I'm like, I should have been donating that year.
Also, dropping that off at the doctor's office was hilarious.
It was so. Satisfying.
To just like swap those like jugs on the counter and have
them like go put gloves on and grab my urine.
And I mean like huge jugs, not my my jugs were also scared.
To like were these see. Through No, they weren't see
through. I have a picture.
I'm going to have to put it on the chat now because it is it is
I'm. Really glad that you.
I am I I document everything for better or for worse or for
worse. Yeah, which is mostly for worse.
But I was just like, this will be a funny story one day.
So here's all of my. Urine.
It's funny. Yeah, but it's because I kept
having, never mind, it's just too much information.
But yeah, it was, yeah, it's not being pregnant and having to
yeah, the urine situation is a lot.
So just I'm relating to this a lot and feeling a little bit
better that mine wasn't quite, you know, I may have had to
collected my urine for 24 hours, but I didn't then go putting it
on my crops. That's true.
Well, and that's good because you know you want to work it
into the soil because you can't just dilute it.
You have to work it into the soil.
Good point, Good point. They do not explain what that
means or how you are supposed to do that, but you want to get it
under the top layer of soil because the ammonia get so your
urea can convert to ammonia gas. So if you cover it, it's less
likely to lose all of the ammonia I guess or the urea
you're going to have. You're going to keep more of the
piss in the ground if you put make sure it gets below the top
layer of the ground because you don't want heat applying to it I
suppose. OK, OK.
Well, yeah, I mean, part of that kind of, oh, there's just a
picture of my boobs. Never mind, never mind.
Those got those also turned into jugs.
Those were. Oh, here it is.
Here it is. Got it.
I look so proud of myself. I look so OK.
It's not 3 gallons. That's totally an exaggeration.
It's like 1 1/2. But we can we can get AI to make
it look like it's 3 gallons if you'd prefer.
Yeah, I'll work on that. Yeah, let me see.
Are you texting this? To me, no.
I'm going to just try to drop it in the chat.
Oh, I think it went above it, but there it is.
Fuck the picture. Oh, it's on the Google.
Yeah, the same one that you put your picture in.
It's just above it now. Oh my God.
Look how happy I am. That's my urine.
Why are they different shapes? Because they've I ran out of
room and the only other one they had was like a different jug
because they were like, what? You're peeing this much?
And I'm like, I can't be the only pregnant woman pissing this
much. Yeah.
I have them in a cooler. I have a picture of them like in
a cooler because I had to keep. Them you had to keep it.
Cool, I guess I had. To keep it.
And it just had my name and birthday on it, so I should have
tried to sell it to some vegans obviously.
God, what was I thinking? OK, so you know 2 giant jugs of
urine. Yeah.
So if you want to use urine as fertilizer, that's those are
recipes. One recipe 2 is you pee onto
mulch and that helps to break it down.
OK, OK. Or you could try and put your
dilute urine, I guess in the mulch, but it's better to pee
directly on the mulch than directly on the plant.
And then I skipped a recipe I guess.
But recipe #4 is called straw Bale bathroom.
You can urinate directly on a Bale of straw until the straw
decomposes. And then they did mention that
they knew someone who then just planted things directly in the
Bale of straw, which that's a lot of pee to put on a Bale of
straw. Like saturated.
I mean, I use straw to like, that's where the in when I have
lambs, right? Like we put straw down, but I
always have like a straw Bale and inevitably they end up
learning how to jump on it and they pee all over it.
Even in months, lambs cannot pee enough to make a straw Bale
break all the way down. So I don't know how much pee
that requires, but it seems like a lot.
And keep in mind that urine is high in salts.
It's not just that you're getting rid of urea and
nitrogenous waste, you are also getting rid of a lot of salts.
So that's part of why you have to dilute it, I guess.
But also I'm wondering if that means that if you've just had a
bag of chips, don't fertilize your garden with your urine.
You know, like I don't know, can.
You eat chips. Though what the speed?
The speed of salt processing right and also the.
I'm so sorry. I just keep thinking about
pregnancy. That was like the old school way
to tell if you were pregnant or not was you would like piss on
piss on like flat, like, I don't know, something that was ready
to bloom and if they fully bloomed, it was because you were
pregnant. I don't know.
I it's like an old school thing of like I'm I'm doing a
horrible. Like.
Because I'm not Googling it. Like the 1700?
Yeah, yeah. No, like Catherine the Great,
like that kind of era of like figuring out if you were
pregnant or not. And you would, yeah, you would
just like, piss on some plants and see if they flowered.
And if so, then you were pregnant.
So. And it has something to do too
with, yeah, the composition of your pee, which makes me wonder,
vegans, should you really just be hitting up pregnant ladies?
Like is pregnant women pee more? Nutritious.
Yeah, yeah. For the plants, because it's
also baby pee. It's a mixture.
It's also your baby. No, no, that's not true.
That's a total fucking lie. The baby's pee stays in the
amniotic fluid. So when your water breaks,
you're actually just like breaking your entire baby's
urine for like 9 months of yeah anyway, if you were like, my
water broke, it's like, bitch, it is not water.
They also had two other notes that I want to read to you, one
of which is of course avoiding illness because pee is not
actually 100% sterile, and it's definitely not 100% sterile 100%
of the time. So if someone has a UTI, they
should probably not be peeing that bacteria onto plants.
You could, I guess, put said urine in a container and leave
it for a while until the bacteria died and then you could
use it, but that seems like a lot of processing for just some
pee when you pee regularly, so that doesn't seem useful.
Pass. And then the last one, which I
think is so goddamn funny because it just feels like, it
seems like it's a problem I never would have contemplated.
And it makes me wonder if vegans are really unhealthy because the
last one is A. And I say last one.
This was the first thing on the website to watch out for, but
I'm reading it last for dramatic effect.
So it is avoiding fecal contamination.
This is the most important step of safe use of urine.
Well, P is almost always sterile, which is not really
true. Yeah.
No. Feces contain dangerous
pathogens. Make sure you get a 100% stream
of pure urine. How are how's that a an issue?
Do you have a cloaca? Do you have a cloaca?
Is veganism giving you such horrible diarrhea that you.
Especially for people with penises, Like why, how you know,
like there's at least some geographic distance there,
hopefully for you. I mean, I don't know.
I don't know, it just makes me concerned for the vegans that
this. EW, I mean, but I thought that
these, I thought a lot of folks like all the farms, because I
was in, I mean, I went through the hippie phase.
It's from, you know, that's what you do.
That's what you do from Eugene. Yeah.
I had an environmental science class where we would tour
community supported agriculture farms.
And yeah, there were quite a few that were composting their own
waste and using it to fertilize the crops that they then they
gave to people. And I was like, OK, all right,
OK. I don't know.
Yeah. So I'm like, I thought the poop
was good, too. I thought it's like all parts of
the Buffalo. I mean First off it's Eugene so
who fucking, but second off I would assume that they are
cooking the poop somehow. That they.
Think heat. I think just by having it, yeah,
I think that the accumulation like they would it let it be
there for a while and then let it kind of naturally heat and
then then distribute amongst the plants.
Yeah. So my guess is that the worry
about vehicle contamination here is that you don't go through
that phase of baking your piss if you're peeing directly on a
plant. But I I just don't see how
that's a possible frequent cross contamination issue unless you
have some serious. Plumbing issues.
Diarrhea issues, right? Yeah, right.
Anyways, that's my extremely long digression on veganism.
And and pee pee and using it in your gardens.
But would they use other animals, Pete?
Granted, that must be so hard to collect.
Like every time you describe trying to like, pregnancy test
one of your animals, I'm just like, how?
How the fuck do you do that? Like it's it's something you
definitely want to block out in your mind afterwards, but it
involved a lot of chasing the cow with a Mason jar.
God, Oh my God. Yeah, I had to.
Trap you couldn't just like strap a little bag on her and
just like wait until she. I mean, I wee wheeze and I I
wanted to avoid the fecal contamination.
So see, see, you're full of shit.
Literally. Ha ha ha.
You proved yourself wrong. They are shaved differently.
Their butt hole is above piss hole so.
Well, depending on what position you're in, Megan.
That's true, but I'm not making a cow like sit stand on its
back. Oh.
My God, that is. So funny kissing in a jar even
workout. Oh my God yeah I had to
eventually trap Tinkerbell and then take the jar and the
directions are like massage gently and the animal will
urinate. But I just kind of smacked at
her with my jar until she bit. Oh my God, you are not a vegan.
You're. It's not a vegan, I am a
monster. Me too, it's cool.
I'm not a farmer either, clearly.
Just. Going to tap in.
Oh my God. Tap that ass.
And I could tell you that as you know, when you're pregnant, man,
that would have been irritating as all fuck.
Someone's just like, I mean, it was me, every doctor's
appointment. And I was just like, guys, I
just can't just please just find another way.
Maybe if I got one of those giant jugs she would have been
more comfortable with it, but. Oh yeah, I just the, the final
pee sample because they made me go to the hospital.
I was like two or three days overdue, which again, I'm a firm
believer in your baby, knowing what time your baby is supposed
to come. So I was like, it's very common
for your first baby to come until 41 or 42 weeks.
So I was in no rush, but they wouldn't let me go home.
They forced me to go to the hospital because my blood
pressure was high and they made me take a urine test.
And I pissed. I think I got like a centimeter
of pee in there. And it was enough for them to be
like, Nope, they're strapping you in.
You can't leave. And then it was a horrible,
horrible 28 hours of Labor. And I don't recommend it to
anyone except those who want to have a baby.
All right, so turtles, this is this is a road trip.
Yeah. I just, I needed to know about
urea and then I got distracted by knowing about fertilizer.
And then I went back and I re read the paper.
And so this paper, they really were very thorough because they
did at least five separate experiments.
And I will not say that they are particularly clear about whether
they did different experiments on different turtles or if
multiple turtles were subject to multiple piss experiments.
But yeah, lots of different tests in order to really
establish is the piss coming out the mouth, is it urea?
Is it happening while they're also breathing?
Are they just gargling because they just want to breathe?
And what's going on with the piss that comes out the back of
the turtle? Because the back of the turtle
also produces piss. So they're Omni peers?
They are. They're Omni.
Peers. They're amidextrous.
They're urine. Ampis Dextrous.
Ampis dextrous. OH Oh my God, I was kind of
wondering about that. I was like, these are mythical
creatures. They they breathe out their butt
and pee out their mouth and please, please someone please
tell me who the fuck design that Please please describe your
divine fucking creator who was like, this is perfect.
I love it. Come on, guys.
Come on. Come on.
Yeah, I don't feel like God wants to take credit for that,
right? That's all dumb turtle evolution
experiment number one. They wanted to know, First off,
hey, how much do turtles pee? Like just generally what's like
the baseline turtle piss when they're just living their lives.
So they attached flexible tubing to their cloaca.
So around their tail basically. Like basically they put like a
vial of plastic all the way around there, so.
Like I'm envisioning kind of like a like AI mean was it?
I'm almost envisioning like a condom strapped on their yeah on
their tail. Yeah, they gave them a little
spacious turtle condom. OK.
They were immersed in water for six days.
And I I do think that there was a bit of a translation issue
here because I'm pretty sure this was just the baseline.
I don't think they drowned turtles for six days.
I'm pretty sure what they mean is they just let them do their
thing for six days and then they everyday took water out and they
took the the tube. I don't think they were holding
the turtles down this whole time.
I think that they. Were just also that intern, that
poor intern. I know, got to take the turtle
piss. God I hope this gets me into
grad school. Now for the second or second
experiment, this is the one where I think it sounds pretty
funny looking. You didn't sound that excited
about it. But what they did is they wanted
to see they they wanted to see if the experimental turtle,
which is how they described it, would dip its head fully, could
dip its head fully into the water at liberty.
So they wanted to basically see whether a turtle will
voluntarily use water whatever way it's using it, right?
So these are these are turtles, they can live in and out of
water. So they took the turtle.
They wanted to make sure it couldn't fully immerse in the
water, so they did strap it to a platform for six days, which, by
the way, they gave extremely specific measurements of.
Centimeters. This scientific method you have
to reproduce this. Here's exactly the plywood we
used. I don't know how big any of the
turtles were, but I know how big the platform was.
They strapped it to for six days.
It's. Not.
This is not this. Is not bad science.
So, so they strapped it to the platform and they put basically
like a little plastic water through in front of it so that
if it wanted to, it could fully immerse its head and gargle, you
know, didn't have to, didn't have to, didn't have to do that
if it didn't want to. Not being forced to gargle.
Not being forced to be. Strapped to a fucking plank for
six days. It's.
Just strapped it can't go anywhere.
OK, you know it's held in place, but.
I would stick my fucking head in a bucket of water too.
They can specify that every day they were feeding these animals
tiger prawns. So they're not vegans.
You know, no, the turtles are meat eaters.
But I mean I'm pretty sure a prawn is a a sea creature and
these are very. Brackish.
So like, they're getting spoiled with prawns.
OK, one way of thinking about it, it's like my worst.
Nightmare fucking I'll strapped to a board and force fed giant
fucking insects. But they're not water boarding
the turtle, they're allowing the turtle to water board itself,
OK. That's right, To end its own
life. Like exactly, you know.
And then of course, they, you know, they got a cross compared
to the piss. So right, they've got a piss
through in the. Back.
And they're emptying these out. My God.
And they do, they do this experiment for six days.
And over those six days they are measuring how much urea is in
the water through how much urea is in the piss through, right.
So like they're also measuring behavior to figure out what the
turtle is doing. And what they found is that
turtles would voluntarily gargle, and they would gargle
for 20 to 100 minutes at a time. Kinky.
Yeah, now with your theory, maybe this turtle was trying to
drown itself. Yeah, yeah.
Just fucking end it, yeah. And just failing and backing out
like this is taking for. I wish I didn't.
I wish I didn't know how to breathe out my ass and could
just send this. It's prom timing.
God damn it, fucking force bed. Okay, this animal is sticking
its head underwater for 20 to 100 minutes at a time and
gargling water. Well, I guess we'd better know
whether or not it's breathing. Is it doing the butthole
breathing at this point, or is it breathing the water?
What? What is it doing right?
Because you know, that's the alternative function.
Maybe it's gargling because it's easier for it to burgle breathe
than it is for it to breathe. Right.
OK, fair. I want to tell you how to
breathe. They take those turtles.
It's not clear if these are the exact same turtles at the exact
same time, but they only did three of them, which makes me
think that they only had three of the probes that they were
using to measure decreases in oxygen.
So no, these are water probes. Don't make that face water
probes. I was like, this is so fucked
up. All right, so they've got these
oxygen probes in the water that are telling them when it's
decreased. So they know because I guess
they're not sitting there watching the turtle 24/7.
So they don't know what it's actively gargling.
They I guess recorded it later, but they we go and they collect
water samples and they because they wanted to do it before
there was a chance that the oxygen would re oxygenate the
water, right, so that they knew how much oxygen had been removed
from the water. So they've got that one.
They did find out that there was oxygen removed.
So these turtles were breathing for sure while they're pissing,
so they're doing. I mean, I guess I can do that
too. That's true.
You're not doing it with the same orifice, but you are
capable of doing it. And don't start yourself short.
That's important, too. Okay, so they're multifaceted.
They can. They can multitask.
They also experiment #4 they put something called fluoretin in
the water. I guess in high doses, or if
you're eating a high protein diet, like you're eating a whole
bunch of tiger bones, it can cause you to not piss.
So at least it causes you to not pass urea.
It is a diuretic, so you will piss more, but you won't be
passing urea. And I'm still not entirely sure
why they did that. Oh no, I don't know what they
did. They did that because they still
noticed the gargling behavior. But during those experiments,
the urea concentration in the water did not change.
So that told them that this was a urea transport like channel
basically, which is the same sort of thing as you find in
your kidneys. So this wasn't that they were
processing urea in their kidneys and then shunting it to their
mouths, it's that the there is processing of basically 2 urea
in the mouth itself and that that's what's happening I guess.
Anyways, experiment #5 this is the one that's not so fun.
Oh, cuz the other ones have been fun, Megan.
They put a whole bunch of ammonium chloride urea or salt
water depending on the turtle, gave it a shot directly into the
stomach of the turtle. And then three hours later they
anesthetized it so that they could swab its mouth and see how
much urea I guess was in the mouth.
Then they waited another three hours and did it again.
Still not entirely sure why they did that, but at the same time,
at the end they killed them and they took blood samples and they
they looked for mRNA and like basically established that
there's quite a lot of these urea transport proteins in their
mouth. So those really are kidney
functioning mouth viliform processes in addition to being
able to breathe. But as they pointed out, if you
need to piss by gargling water, you also need to breathe at the
same time. So it kind of makes sense that
maybe you're highly vascularized.
Piss organs are also capable of collecting oxygen, because
otherwise you'd probably drown while trying to take a.
Piss. Oh my God.
Yeah, OK, my like, yeah, that's
fucked up. But my one question I'm still
wondering is how do you inject anything directly into the
stomach of a turtle? Isn't there like shells in?
The way soft shell. Soft.
Rude. Oh that is so fucked up.
Oh that is so sad. They have bigger gaps on their
side than a hard sell do. You still got to go for just go.
Just it doesn't matter. You're like, could you at least
give me a tiger prawn? You're about to die.
You. Just give me one final tiger
prawn before you stab me in the stomach and then murder me.
Oh God. Well, well, so so why?
They wanted to know if it was pissing out of no, no, no, but.
Why did they think the turtles are pissing out their mouth?
Ohk. OK, where are the turtles
pissing out their mouth? Yeah, I've I've already
established that man is evil. Like that's easy.
So the thought is, remember that there's that dilution criteria,
right? So like urea still does need to
be diluted. And these reptiles, for whatever
reason, they haven't fully adapted to using ammonia.
And even though they're fresh water turtles, so you'd think
that they'd have a lot of water, a lot of them live in kind of
brackish freshwater. So not like perfectly fresh
freshwater. So actually maybe they were able
to get prawns on their own. I don't know, maybe that's why.
Maybe they're I don't read but maybe they're prawn.
Maybe they do love prawns. Yeah, I mean, they do love
prawns, that was established, but they.
Deserved. Some shrimp cocktail is their
natural diet. Like maybe.
Yeah. So in brackish water, if you're
ingesting a whole lot of water, you also have to be capable of
getting rid of all of the salt, right?
And so I guess the idea is that this is a workaround to still be
getting rid of urea because they aren't adapted for ammonia.
And also because drinking that much water would potentially
cause them to increase a whole bunch of salt and it would cause
all of these problems. So instead of like full on
taking water full of salt, passing it all the way through
your system and all the way through your kidneys in order to
piss, all you do is it's basically taking your kidney and
shaking it in the water. So you don't even have to put
water into your body, you can just mix it because your kidney
is your mouth hairs and it's free floating.
Would it make a kidney like transplant easier or harder?
Do they still have kidneys? I mean, do they have kidneys?
Yes. So what the fuck do their
kidneys do? Sit around eating shrimp?
They. Do pass some ammonia, so I guess
turtles have or These turtles at least have both ammonia and
urea. When they have the option to
gargle. The only thing they're really
gargling is urea. Very little if any ammonia is
coming out of the turtle. The piss is mostly, but if
they're not given the chance to gargle then their piss is urea,
so they've got a backup system in the form of kid.
That's beautiful. That's that's that's see, I
don't, I find that a fucked up creation of God, but a beautiful
tangent of evolution. Yeah, I'm like, wow.
Also horrified. Wow.
OK so this is an economic thing. Is this still related to trying
to like keep them alive or something?
Like why have they done so much research on this?
Or is this literally just like someone has become completely
fucking obsessed with this and made it their entire career?
Or like what is the like bigger picture significance of trying
to figure out if these turtles can piss through their mouth?
Like why do they care? I think a big part of it is
maybe it's because they're economically important, but I
think it's also because they're economically available.
Like if you're going to run an experiment on an animal, you
need access to that animal. And if that animal is raised on
farms, it's a lot easier to get turtles, right?
Like. And so they just got lucky that
this thing that they happened to already farm, it also was
fucking weird. And they're like, let's figure
out everything we can about this in crop milk, I mean.
If I saw my sheep constantly going up to a water through and
gargling, I would also be curious as to what the fuck they
were doing. So I think it's just that they
noticed some weird behavior because it's economically
important. They noticed some weird anatomy.
And yeah, literally over 100 years after they noticed the
weird anatomy, a scientist was like, hey, I bet that's I bet
that's for piss. Let's find out if it's Piss I.
Bet that's for piss. Wow, yeah, I have a lot of
feelings, so I can't even really describe.
You just took me on quite the roller coaster.
So like, I need to call my therapist.
Back and I know you don't think it's funny, but the idea of
these turtles strapped to tables gargling out of a through it's
it's really funny to. Me OK, baby, you should call a
therapist. I'm just saying.
I mean, I yeah, yeah, yes.
It's good to find the humor in things.
I suppose. We already did it.
So find the yes. I mean, that's what motivates me
through every day of life. It's finding something to laugh.
At, I mean, I don't know, they're being strapped to a
table and given the option to gargle water.
Is that much worse than having a custom blood made for you?
Right, without your kids set like we don't speak.
Yeah, without your consent. And you're a wild turtle just
plucked from the wild like an alien and proved that's how they
determined oxygen. If you didn't listen to that
particular episode or all of the times we talked.
About it. So I mean, turtles are
definitely one of our like, definitely mascots of the shows.
They are very weird and they've been around a lot.
So they're very dead. And these ones are also dead.
Very fucking dead. Yeah, that's true.
These are dead. These these experimental.
Oh my God, but. These individuals are dead.
Right, but do you think that this adaptation is present in
other turtles? I I mean that 1800s citation
saying that it's in some some soft shelled turtles, I would
imagine it's in more than one species of soft shell turtles.
It seems like a pretty advanced adaptation as well.
So I mean, it's not something we could see in the fossil record,
but it's definitely, it seems pretty complicated to have
evolved exclusively in a single species.
I mean, I bet there's some mouth hair and a lot of soft water.
Soft shelled. We do have a good fossil record
of soft shelled turtles, so I do wonder if any of them are in
like a logger shot that would potentially have preserved, I
guess, soft tissue. Yeah, and you could actually.
But you'd have to be able to see the inside of the mouth too, you
know. But.
What if you like CT edit I? Maybe, I feel.
New gold is such a. Small character.
I didn't kill this turtle. Life did.
A volcanic eruption did. Let's CT its throat.
Why? Don't worry about it.
Thinking about it is just going
to disturb. You, yeah.
I assure you. One I just yeah, I wonder how
many I just I'm never going to look at a turtle the same way.
Most from either end. Any angle of a turtle.
I'm now just full of questions. Thank you for listening.
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