“Monkey see, monkey do” isn’t just a playground aphorism, it’s a pretty apt way of describing the behavior of us primates. Some of our contagious behaviors are involuntary; for example, if someone yawns in our vicinity, we might find ourselves also trying to suppress a yawn. Other primates, including chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), experience similar phenomena such as contagious yawning, scratching, grooming and playing. Now there is research which reveals chimps even pee contagiously.
A recent study in the journal Current Biology led by scientists at Kyoto University’s Wildlife Research Center found that if one individual chimp starts to urinate, others that see it will feel compelled to do so. While this may seem odd to humans, who are far more inclined to seek privacy rather than intimacy when urinating, the chimps’ behavior in fact directly relates to our own. This behavior may help with territorial markings, but also group bonding or even preparing to travel — essentially the ape version of going pee before heading on a road trip.
“Humans and non-human animals share many social phenomena linked to group living — we’re all influenced by the presence of others, even in everyday activities,” lead author Ena Onishi, a Kyoto University primate researcher, told Salon. “For instance, behaviors like yawning, walking, rhythmic tapping, and even changes in pupil size are contagious in both humans and chimpanzees. Our study fits into this framework by showing that urination, a seemingly simple physiological act, can also spread socially within a group.”
To learn this, the scientists recorded 20 captive chimpanzees over a period of more than 600 hours. They compared the animals’ synchronization rate (proportion of urinations within 60 seconds of another) to 1,000 sessions of randomized computer simulations of urination, finding that the former showed more evidence of urination acts deliberately coinciding rather than occurring arbitrarily. Then they studied whether urinators and potential followers were more likely to pee simultaneously when standing closer to each other, which proved to be the case. Finally, they examined whether individuals higher in the chimpanzees’ social hierarchies were more influential in inspiring urination acts than low-status individuals, and found that that did indeed happen often.
“These results support the notion of socially contagious urination,” the authors conclude. Co-author Shinya Yamamoto, an associate professor of primatology at Kyoto University, told Salon that this finding is significant because it is the first to ever study contagious urination in any animal, including humans. Now that they have found all of this new data, more questions have been raised.
“We need to investigate this further from a broader comparative perspective,” Yamamoto said. “Apes have a wide variety of social structures and dynamics.” As one example, chimpanzees and bonobos do not have strict hierarchies based on individuals being male or female, as seen among other primate species. Similarly “chimpanzee society is more competitive in nature, but may be better at group cooperation, such as cooperative hunting and border patrolling, than bonobos that have a more peaceful society characterised by high inter-individual tolerance. Gorillas form a family-like society, typically with a single adult male and several females and offspring, whereas orangutans are basically solitary.”
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All of these differences, Yamamoto explained, could determine how contagiously each species of primate urinates. Right now, the researchers aren’t entirely sure why this happens, proposing that “experimental work targeting the potential sensory cues and social triggers will be necessary to examine underlying mechanisms.”
When most people encounter each other in a public bathroom, the last thing they want to do is pay attention to another person’s business. Humans treat our waste excretion as an intensely private experience. Animals, not so much.
“Exploring this connection between physiological responses and social living offers valuable insights into how social animals have evolved systems to maintain group cohesion,” Onishi said.
Studying chimpanzees has taught us a huge amount about our own evolution. A 2023 study in the journal Nature Communications revealed that chimpanzees have specific sounds associated with warning their peers about the presence of snakes. They did this by pranking the chimpanzees with fake snakes, then recording their responses.
“We propose the ‘alarm-huu + waa-bark’ represents a compositional syntactic-like structure, where the meaning of the call combination is derived from the meaning of its parts,” the authors explained in their study. University of Zurich professor Simon Townsend, a study co-author, told Salon at the time that “humans and chimpanzees last shared a common ancestor approximately 6 million years ago. Our data therefore indicate that the capacity to combine meaningful vocalizations is potentially at least 6 million years old, if not older.”
Similarly, a 2022 study in the journal Communications Biology learned that a group of 46 chimpanzees at Taï National Park in the African country of Côte d’Ivoire can produce 390 distinct vocalizations. Catherine Crockford of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who co-authored the paper, told Salon by email at the time, “What is astonishing in the chimpanzee vocal repertoire, compared to other non-human animals, is the extreme flexibility in which they can combine their limited number of signals.”
While urinating may seem wildly different than speaking, both acts can form bonds between individuals and thereby strengthen social cohesion. Indeed, that was Onishi’s ultimate conclusion about the relevance of their research.
“When one chimpanzee urinates, others nearby are more likely to urinate within a short time frame,” Onishi said. “It’s not like they intentionally gather to urinate together — since they urinate wherever they are. Perhaps it might be easy to imagine contagious yawning.”
Dr. Dale Kocevski, a professor of astronomy and physics at Colby College, announced on Tuesday that he had solved a mystery which could have broken what scientists thought they knew about the universe. In early 2023, JWST found a series of little red dots (LRDs) in photographs from the ancient universe, less than a billion years after the Big Bang. In theory, the 341 red dots should not exist, because according to cosmological theory, stars and other celestial material should not be able to accumulate in such a short period of time.
Yet according to Kocevski, the LRDs are not so inexplicable after all. They are just growing supermassive black holes, he said at a lecture at the 245th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, accompanied by a paper due to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
“When LRD were first identified, people thought they were massive galaxies that existed very early in the history of the universe,” Kocevski said, adding that they were dubbed “universe breaking” because they would have been too massive to be formed so early in the universe’s history. “However, if some of the light from LRDs can be attributed to a growing supermassive black hole (which we think is the case), then this would reduce the implied stellar mass of these galaxies. This essentially solves the too massive, too early problem that LRDs seemed to originally present.”
After further research into the LRDs, Kocevski and his team confirmed that 81percent of the subset are active galactic nuclei, or AGN, meaning they have central black holes which cause them to glow at the brightness that led to such puzzlement in the first place. Yet while these observations about LRDs answer some questions, they also raise provocative new ones.
“The most exciting thing for me is the redshift distribution. These really red, high-redshift sources basically stop existing at a certain point after the big bang,” Steven Finkelstein, a co-author of the study at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement. “If they are growing black holes, and we think at least 70 percent of them are, this hints at an era of obscured black hole growth in the early universe.”
Indeed, the LRDs indicate that the formation of our universe needs to account for the abundance of black holes.
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“The other significance is that obscured black hole growth in the early universe is much more common than we previously observed,” Kocevski said. “There were predictions that this would be the case, but the prevalence of dust-reddened black hole growth in the LRDs, which are very numerous, is observational evidence of this.”
Writing about the LRDs for Big Think, theoretical physicist and science writer Ethan Siegel observed that Kocevski’s research validates the usefulness of JWST as a tool for learning more about the universe. When the mystery of the LRDs first became apparent, professional and citizen scientists alike bandied about alternative theories for the LRDs’ redness, all of which is healthy for the state of scientific discourse. One side argued that the stars in the given galaxies were very old, or “red-and-dead,” since the shortest lived stars burn bright and hot blue, and therefore redefined what we know about the universe. The other claimed that the galaxies were very dusty (which Kocevski says is the case with the LRDs), because the cosmic dust blocks the light that would otherwise emanate from stars and other objects behind the dust.
Now we know that the second theory was likely correct — and also why Kocevski seemed to “solve the puzzle.”
“We know that these little red dots have contributions from stars within the galaxy and also from the activity of the central black hole,” Siegel wrote. “Because you can quantify which components of the light you observe (the flat, rest-frame ultraviolet) is caused by the stars in these LRDs compared to the components (the rising, rest-frame optical and infrared) caused by the active black hole, you can make estimates for the stellar mass of each galaxy, the central black hole mass in each galaxy, and then determine both how massive the galaxy is and just how ‘overmassive’ each black hole is.”
Kocevski added that because of the new research, “we are witnessing the very early growth of the supermassive black holes that are found at the center of today’s massive galaxies.” Because the black holes appear to be overmassive, meaning they are larger relative to their host galaxies than scientists would anticipate, it indicates “massive holes may have formed first and then galaxies grow around them at later times.”
For his part, Kocevski is thrilled that he was able to utilize the JWST to illuminate a great outer space enigma.
“The discovery of LRDs is a testament to the power of JWST in both identifying objects that we couldn’t see previously and providing the data (in this case infrared spectroscopy) needed to understand them,” Kocevski said.
Chetan Shetty is the executive chef at Passerine, a seasonal Indian restaurant in New York City’s fashionable Flatiron district. Before moving to the United States, however, Chef Shetty lived in Mahabaleshwar, a small town in India famous for its holy sites, majestic rivers and delicious strawberries.
Yet Shetty ruefully acknowledges that climate change has put a damper on that last part of his hometown’s legacy. Thanks to Earth’s rising temperatures, there has been a “reduction in the yield and quality of strawberries” in Mahabaleshwar. It is just one example of a trend noticed by not only this Michelin-starred chef, but countless others who work with food for a living: Humanity’s overreliance on fossil fuels is hurting the agricultural industry we all rely upon.
The trends of global heating makes people like Greg Hall nervous. The founder and owner of Virtue Cider, a Michigan-based creator of farmhouse cider only using locally sourced fruit, generates 61% of their electricity from 200 solar panels out of awareness of climate change. Hall is very aware of how climate change imperils his harvest. He says he’s lucky there aren’t issues with the quality of his apples, but yields have dropped as temperatures unexpectedly change.
“Climate change has made early spring much warmer,” Hall said. “In 2012, the apple trees in Michigan went to bloom in March too early. When an April freeze came, since the buds were already out, they froze and didn’t produce apples.” Michigan lost over 90% of the apple crop that year as a result of that bout of weird weather. “The trees rebounded, but that was our first crop year. It was a disaster.”
Jason Perkins is similarly worried about the raw materials he needs for his livelihood. He is brewmaster at the Maine-based Allagash Brewing Company, which crafts Belgian-based beers, and like all brewmasters Perkins relies on a range of crops. Beers can be made using grains like wheat, barley and hops, all of which are threatened by climate change.
“We are finding challenges related to climate change in the reliability of being able to source raw ingredients,” Perkins said. “To both deal with that reality, and decrease our own footprint, we’ve been working closely with local farmers and maltsters to strengthen our food systems close to home.”
In addition to impacting the ease with which farmers can cultivate crops like strawberries and apples, or make alcoholic products like beer, climate change is also negatively impacting the nutritiousness of the foods that we finally are able to consume. Chef Nekia Hattley, the Los Angeles-based owner of vegan products and meals company My Daddy’s Recipes, told Salon she has noticed changes in the quality and flavor of food.
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“While I can’t definitively say it’s all due to climate change, there’s no doubt that something is shifting,” Hattley said. “Whether it’s the quality of our soil, the pesticides and chemicals we allow on our crops, or even food being grown in less natural conditions, the difference is undeniable.”
As one example, Hattley points to watermelons, a crop known for being sensitive to fluctuations in temperature such as those caused by climate change.
“What used to be a juicy, sweet reminder of summer now often tastes rubbery and bland,” Hattley said. Red bell peppers, which also suffer in quality and quantity because of climate change, “sometimes have an odd, dark discoloration inside and don’t seem as vibrant or crisp as they once were.”
There is more than Hattley’s hunch to let people know their food’s quality is dropping because of climate change. Scientists have confirmed that as carbon dioxide levels rise in the atmosphere, staple crops like wheat and rice lose vitamins, proteins and micronutrients like zinc and iron that humans need to survive.
“It’s a really strong example of planetary health: Something that we’re doing to the environment is impacting health,” Dr. Samuel Myers, director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health and a professor in Environmental Health and Engineering, said in a statement at the time. “As we change these complex systems, we’re seeing unintended consequences and unanticipated results.”
People who enjoy steak and burgers, as well as dairy products, will also feel the strain because of these nutrient deficiencies. Cattle eat grasses that provide them with essential proteins, and that protein content is dropping as grasses languish with rising temperatures and carbon dioxide levels. Even when climate change is not making vital foods more scarce and less nutritious, it is literally knocking the raw materials around by causing extreme weather events.
“As a chef, I’ve come to realize that many vegetables now have increasingly shorter seasonal availability due to unpredictable weather,” Shetty said. “Flooding and drought significantly impact wild-foraged products, with damage that often takes years to stabilize. For example, the floods in North Carolina in September 2024 severely affected Appalachian truffle foragers.”
He also mentioned how climate change is driving coral ecosystems to extinction, which will hurt his bottom line by “disrupting the delicate balance of the food chain.”
If things continue to spiral out of control, what’s different on the menu might be the least of our problems. In some cases, there could be no menu at all. As the world gets hotter, famine too has risen. “In 2023, 281.6 million people faced high levels of acute food insecurity in 59 countries/territories, with numbers increasing every year since 2019,” reads an introduction to a 2024 special issue on famine and food insecurity in the journal Disasters.
The overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change is caused by human activity, particularly our overuse of fossil fuels. As humans dump carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, fluorinated gases and water vapor into the atmosphere, the overheating planet causes droughts and heatwaves to become more frequent and more intense, sea levels to rise and hurricanes to become more extreme. As this happens, food experts like Hattley will find innovative ways to improve the quality of what they create, despite the fossil fuel-imposed obstacles.
“For me, the solution has been sourcing as much as I can from local farmers who prioritize soil health and traditional growing methods,” Hattley said. “The produce I buy from them feels closer to what I remember eating as a child — flavorful and nutrient-dense. If climate change continues to disrupt growing seasons and traditional farming methods, I fear that unless we’re proactive, food quality will only continue to decline, and we’ll lose more of the natural goodness we once took for granted.”
According to a recent report by the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative (ICCI), a worldwide group of scientists who study Earth’s frozen regions, the rapidly accelerating melting of all our ice is raising sea levels. Ironically, this is threatening the very industry overwhelmingly responsible: the fossil fuel industry, which will definitely feel the strain of rising sea levels, which is already impacting coastal regions across the globe.
As a result, oil ports in cities like Houston and Galveston and in nations like China and Saudi Arabia are threatened with being overwhelmed, according to the report. As sea levels rise, coastal communities become increasingly vulnerable to flooding and other extreme weather events. When those events occur, their infrastructure and other valuable resources get compromised.
Much of the damage from rising sea levels is baked into humanity’s future, but these losses can be mitigated. As the authors write, costs and damages will be even more extreme, “with many regions experiencing sea-level rise or water resource loss well beyond adaptation limits in this century if our current level of emissions continues – leading towards a rise of 3º C or more.”
For the first time in human history, Earth had an average global temperature 1.5º C higher than pre-industrial levels in 2024. That was the threshold established by the 2015 Paris climate accord as a possible tipping point for containing damage to the planet. As greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane are released into the atmosphere, they trap heat (hence “greenhouse”), warming the planet in ways that cause extreme weather from droughts and heat waves to hurricanes and rising sea levels.
“Refusing to turn off the oil taps means keeping the taps on for sea level rise,” James Kirkham, the chief science adviser at ICCI, said in a statement to The Guardian. “Accelerated ice melt and ocean expansion has already caused the rate of sea level rise to double in the last 30 years. Unless leaders double down on transitioning away from fossil fuels, the terrible impacts of sea level rise will only increase further – affecting every country with a coastline, including those who continue to obstruct increased decarbonisation efforts.”
