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Peeing Is Socially Contagious In Chimps
After observing 20 chimpanzees for over 600 hours, researchers in Japan found that chimps are more likely to urinate after witnessing others do so. "[T]he team meticulously recorded the number and timing of 'urination events' along with the relative distances between 'the urinator and potential foll...
"[T]he team meticulously recorded the number and timing of 'urination events' along with the relative distances between 'the urinator and potential followers,'" writes 404 Media's Becky Ferreira. Contagious urination, like other forms of behavioral and emotional state matching, may have important implications in establishing and maintaining social cohesion, in addition to potential roles in preparation for collective departure (i.e. voiding before long-distance travel) and territorial scent-marking (i.e. coordination of chemosensory signals). It remains possible that latent individual factors associated with low dominance status (e.g. vigilance and attentional bias, stress levels, personality traits) might shape the contagion of urination, or alternatively that there are true dominance-driven effects.
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