When last we met, I was on the toilet wondering about sea creatures and whether or not they have to pee. Peeing in your own preferred medium seems awfully untidy. But the ocean is large, so maybe it’s just a fart in a gale-storm (as the folks in Maine like to say, only with an accent).

I don’t understand ocean critters at all. Are their cells filled with seawater? They can’t be, right? They’d get all puckery. Half the things you find in the ocean are hallucinations anyway. Jellyfish, come on. They’re entirely imaginary. So do they pee? And if they do, do they ever feel a sense of…urgency? I mean, they’d just be, like, peeing in a pool. A really big pool. No one would know. There wouldn’t even be a warm spot. According to lore, jellyfish have a mouth hole, and it’s the same hole as their anus. Even the most tolerant among us would have to concede this is a major design flaw. Fortunately, they’re not real.

Moving on to actual creatures, we have your sharks. Sharks do not pee. Not exactly. They do convert ammonia into urea and then they store it in their blood and tissues, which helps keep them from osmosing their personal water into the sea. If they couldn’t keep the proper balance of salts, they’d go completely flat and lose a lot of their menace. But if they get too much urea going on, they excrete it through their skin, which is sort of revolting. Scientists now believe White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller does the same thing.

Most marine invertebrates have about the same degree of saltiness in their cells as in their environment, so they don’t get any flatter than they started out.

Take squids. They’re just seawater in a squid suit. Yes, they have a body, of sorts, but it’s hardly the tidy closed system we’re familiar with. Half of them is just an open sack. True, we are too, but we are much daintier about it. We have a tiny mouth and a tinier butthole, most of us. Squid bodies include what’s called a “mantle,” which is just an open bag of seawater that nominally covers a redundancy of hearts (three) and other organs. Those organs have all the protection of fruit in a soggy sack. And squids do pee (a little) and poop, but guess the hell what. They do it in their mantle. Yes. The squid poops its mantle pants (or, in the case of the Atlantic Brief Squid, its underpants). Well, it’s a living.

The saving grace here is that the squid can then draw a bunch of seawater into its mantle and forcibly eject it, which is how they jet-propel themselves through the water, but I would think it has the added benefit of getting rid of all the poop and pee in its pants and, at the very same time, getting as far away from it as possible. Which is just what we would want to do, under the circumstances.

You, the squid, are still in the position of living in an environment filled with other critters’ poop and pee, and that might seem less than ideal, but it’s worked for millions of years. We, on the other hand, are living with a mounting debris field of pee and poop and things we have only recently hauled out of the ground and put into the air and water, and suddenly it’s not working out for us anymore. Or the squids, unfortunately. We humans have an enormous midden. Look it up. It’s not as nice as it sounds.

Thank you for reading another thrilling episode of Toilet Meditations, or A Thoughty on the Potty.