Hate waiting in line for the bathroom? Chimpanzees have a social solution: Go all at once.
A new study shows that peeing is contagious in chimpanzees, making it “the first study to investigate contagious urination in animals, including humans,” says Shinya Yamamoto, an animal behavior scientist at Kyoto University in Japan.
While observing a group of captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), something caught the attention of Ena Onishi, who also studies animal behavior at Kyoto University. “I noticed a tendency for individuals to urinate at the same time,” she says. “This resemblance to certain human behaviors piqued my curiosity. In Japan, my home country, there is a specific term called