Dolphin Urine Sample

As promised, the saga of my newfound knowledge of collecting a specimen from a dolphin. On our second night in Vegas, the company had arranged a private party at the Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat, where the animals from Siegfried and Roy's show live when they aren't on stage. Technically, all of the animals live in quarters away from the public areas and take turns spending the day in the exhibit habitat. When there is a private event, the animals stay out a little later and keep their trainers and keepers up to talk to the people. One of the dolphin trainers mentioned that the cetaceans-in-residence take part in research projects, mostly related to dolphin breeding programs, and that researchers from universities often call them up for blood or urine samples for off-site research projects.

This leads to the inevitable pondering: these are marine mammals. How does one go about collecting a urine sample from something that swims around all day? I figured that I was only going to get one shot at finding out, so I asked. As it turns out, one gets a urine sample from a dolphin in much the same way one gets one from a human: get the mammal to pee in a cup. Since one can't exactly send a dolphin into the bathroom with a Dixie cup, the dolphin has to come up onto the shallow platform, tail-first. It then lifts its tail up and the keeper squeezes the necessary specimen out of the dolphin. The photo below has two of the smaller dolphins from the habitat demonstrating the position, face-first instead of tail-first.
You learn something new every day. Today, that something is collecting urine samples from a dolphin. The keeper was a little more circumspect about how they get the dolphins to voluntarily give semen samples, except to say that in dolphins, it is a muscular reaction, rather than the nerve-based reaction it is in humans. This bonus factoid is brought to you by the letters T, M, and I.