Impressing your mate through urination: No, it's not a matter of nerves. Pheromones are a big deal when it comes to mating in the animal world, although the debate continues about their relevance to human pairings. It's not a surprise to see a paper entitled "Tactical Release of a Sexually-Selected Pheromone in a Swordtail Fish," but the amusing bit is the method used to track the release: the researchers injected fluorescent dyes in the male fishes' abdomens, then put them in a tank with or without females. "Males urinated more frequently in the presence and proximity of an audience," they found.
The authors note that, in the wild, males approached potential mates from the upstream direction. Apparently, urination is a way of ensuring that they get the hint. Note: this probably doesn't work in public pools.
A touch of aggression: A bit more about pheromones in the water. Female squid leave their eggs on the open sea floor and wait for males to spot them. Should the males get close enough to touch them, however, the females have a bit of a surprise in store: a pheromone they deposit on the egg case completely rewires the male squid's behavior, turning it from a calm, schooling animal to one that will attack any other males in sight—even if there's no female around. Incidentally, we mammals have genes for proteins that are related to the squid pheromone.
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