Animals that give each other gifts just like humans

If you open your annual Christmas gift of colorful socks with crushing disappointment, you can at least be grateful that you’re not a female scorpionfly.

If so, the best you could hope for as a gift would be a spitball from the love of your life. However, far from being disappointed, the female scorpion flies enjoy the tasty treat and They reward their suitors with the opportunity to mate with them.

It has been observed that the male presents the female with a nutritious morsel during courtship and mating in species as diverse as snails, earthworms and squid.

Birds are also known to like to give gifts, such as male king shrikes who stick small creatures into thorns and twigs to impress their mates, before offer them as gifts during the courtship.

However, the phenomenon is more common among insects and arachnids. Male six-spot moths, for example, give their female partners cyanide which they supply to them through their sperm.

Nursery web spiders, on the other hand, give their mates potential prey wrapped in silk, with added chemicals to make them more attractive.

If the female refuses, the male simply adds more wrapping to the gift, before offering it to her again.

Sometimes males try to trick females by enveloping them with low-quality prey or even insignificant half-eaten morsels.

While the female is busy unwrapping what she thinks is an important gift, the male mates with her and runs off before she realizes.

One study found that even 70% of the gifts given by male nursery web spiders are fake.

“There are males that try to cheat. They might wrap around an old, dry cricket leg or something,” says Darryl Gwynne, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Toronto in Canada.

Other insects have been known to try to skimp on gifts as well.

“Near my house in the spring there is a really beautiful activity: male dancing flies come out over the river and catch aquatic insects,” says Gwynne.

“They bring them back and females compete for prey because they cannot feed themselves and they need this nutrition to produce their eggs. “On one occasion, I saw a male come in with a ball of willow fluff coming off the seed and tried to present it to her.”

Although presenting a worthless gift may benefit the male in the short term, as soon as the female has opened her gift and realizes that she has been deceived, she will reject it. This means that he will only be able to mate with her for a short period.

Since female insects usually mate with several suitors, the dishonest male’s sperm will be less likely to fertilize her eggswhich means he will lose out in the long run.

Some insects offer the ultimate gift of self-sacrifice to females they want to court. During mating, the male sagebrush cricket let the female nibble its hind wingseven allowing it to suck its hemolymph (the equivalent of blood in insects).

According to one study, once the males have endured this “love bite”their chances of finding another partner are slim because they simply lack the energy to pursue other romantic encounters.

Meanwhile, the male redback spider will literally backflip and collide with the female’s jaws during copulation, allowing him to chew on the end of her abdomen until he finally consumes it.

“In a sense, you could say he feels wronged because he loses his life,” Wynne says.

“But from a Darwinian adaptation perspective, finding a female to mate with is such a rare and fortunate occurrence in redback spiders that, By performing this backflip and distracting her with food, she extends copulation and allows him to release more sperm. As a consequence, you will almost certainly have more offspring as a result.”

In 2022, entomologist Chufei Tang of the Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences in China and her colleagues discovered an example of a gift-giving insect preserved in 99 million-year-old amber.

Inside the ancient amber, a male fly of the genus Alavesia holds between his legs an empty, foamy balloon made of mucus.

All of these examples are nuptial gifts that males give to females to convince them to mate. Most of the time, These gifts have nutritional valueso the female also benefits.

However, animals are sometimes known to give gifts just to please to the recipient.

For example, dolphins have been observed giving food to people, with offerings including eels, tuna, and octopus. There are also stories of crows giving gifts to humans who have helped them in the past.

“I have received gifts from crows, including nuts, olives, beer bottle caps and wine corks,” says Nicola Clayton, professor of comparative cognition at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

A 2013 study found that Bonobos, like humans, sometimes give gifts to strangers in acts of apparent charity.

“Luckily, they haven’t offered me any animals because I’m a vegetarian. I would prefer a jewel,” says Clayton.

Eurasian jays, which are members of the crow family, also appear to give gifts to their partners simply for the pleasure of giving.

In an experiment conducted by Clayton and his team, males watched their partners eat moths or worms.

When given the opportunity to give their partners a juicy bite, the males consistently opted for different foods.

In other words, the males understood that the females would prefer something new to more of the same.

“It’s like you went out to dinner and you just ate some delicious spaghetti bolognese,” says Clayton.

“If someone said to you, ‘Do you want more?’ you would say, ‘No, thank you.’ But you can find room for dessert. The jays seemed to know what their mates wanted and they could give them the right gift, regardless of what they themselves wanted.”

Bonobos, a species of great ape that shares almost 99% of its DNA with humans, also They usually give gifts altruistically.

A 2013 study found that bonobos, like humans, sometimes give gifts to strangers in acts of apparent charity.

In the case of the bonobos, the apes decided to share food, including apples and bananas, with other bonobos that were not part of their group, and They even decided to give up their own food to be able to interact with the stranger.

All of this leads us to wonder why animals give each other gifts. As this behavior has evolved several times in different species, it is likely that improve reproductive capacity of both males and females.

This is true for insects and arachnids, except when one party cheats. “He provides her with food and she provides him with access to her reproductive tract,” Gwynne says.

But if this doesn’t sound particularly romantic, you can take comfort in knowing that other animals, such as crows and bonobos, They also seem to enjoy the simple act of giving.

“In the insect world, the male gives the gift so he can mate with the female, but jays mate for life, so it’s not a bribe, it’s a gift,” Clayton says.

“Jays are very intelligent and long-lived animals and, as you know, getting a relationship is one thing, but maintaining it for many years is much more difficult. Therefore, “Gifts are a token of gratitude.”.

Therefore, in the case of crows, such as the Eurasian jay, what drives the animals to give gifts is probably the same as in humans: strengthen social ties with those closest to you.

Doesn’t that give you a nice warm feeling?