This Christmas morning, are you worried you didn’t choose quite the right gift for that someone special? I always try my hardest, but everywhere I turn I’m bombarded with unhelpful suggestions. No, I don’t want a candle that smells like turkey, because, well, we’ll be cooking turkey. Nor do I want a sunrise alarm clock that mimics natural light, because I can leave the curtains open. And I definitely don’t want a salmon DNA pink collagen jelly mask (Good Housekeeping’s Best for Beauty Lovers), because said DNA comes from milt. AKA semen. If I wanted fish sperm on my face, I would tickle some pollocks.
So if, like me, you’re always looking for inspiration, my advice is: learn from the animal kingdom. Humans didn’t invent gifting. The practice has been around for at least 100m years, long before our species evolved. With a little help from natural selection, this has given wild animals ample time to perfect the art of giving. Hell, some spiders even gift-wrap!
Excluding exercise-related items and other things I don’t like, there are five categories of Christmas gift: food, things for the home, bling, skincare and clothing. The animal kingdom has them all covered.
Brazilian cuckoos give their partners high-protein snacks such as insects, frogs and lizards, but if you like your meat shished, then the great grey shrike, also known as the butcher bird, has your back. Males impale prey, such as insects and mice, on sharp thorns and twigs to create artisan kebabs.
Some insects gift their beaus spitballs, but these aren’t just any spitballs. These are scorpionfly spitballs, crafted with the freshest saliva from the engorged labial glands of only the fittest males. The delicacy is nutrient-dense, which is one of the reasons females prefer males with big balls.
Male scorpionfly with a sizeable tail. Photograph: Ger Bosma/Getty Images
Another reason is that the fittest males make the biggest spitballs, and when I say “fit” I don’t mean “looks great in a leather jacket” (although they probably do). I mean “fit” in the genetic sense. The gifts are given as a prelude to sex, so by choosing the male with the biggest package, the female is also selecting genetic quality.
She then consumes the delicacy during sex but terminates intercourse as soon it’s all gone. Bigger spitballs mean longer copulation times, during which the male can transfer more sperm and the female can’t mate with anyone else. This explains why he bothers with such an elaborate offering.
Adélie penguins don’t give food, but they do give things for the home. In Antarctica, where they live, there is no B&Q, so the birds must source their gifts from the local landscape. Each breeding season, males collect pebbles and start making a nest with them. The vital building blocks are scarce, prompting some chancers to steal pebbles from their neighbours, but when a male gives a pebble to a female, it is a sign he is ready to commit. Think of it as the penguin equivalent of a diamond ring. The rock doesn’t go on her finger, however. If she also wants to get serious, she accepts the pebble and adds it to the nest. Then, after a few finishing touches, they are ready to start their family.
Speaking of bling, crows excel at this gift category. There are many stories of people who have befriended wild corvids and then been given bottle tops, screws, buttons and other shiny items in return. In Florida, Alberta and Chuck Holloway even received a diamond bracelet from a crow they fed regularly. This is particularly endearing because while most animals give presents in the hope of scoring (sound familiar?), crows apparently just enjoy giving.
In Western Australia, meanwhile, dolphins have been spotted plucking clumps of sea sponge from the ocean floor and using them in interesting ways. Sometimes when they’re rummaging around for fish, they wear the sponges on their beak to help protect their skin. And sometimes, when males want to woo females, they don them like jaunty hats before presenting them as gifts.
In so doing, dolphins brilliantly combine the last two categories of Christmas gift. Sea sponges are clothing and skincare. And if that’s not enough, when males give their sponge hats away, they often strike a U-shaped “banana pose” and play a little tune through their blowhole.
This is not the half-arsed giving of domestic animals – my friend’s cat, Lilly, recently presented her with a dead mouse which she then stashed in an obscure corner of the house – or some people I could mention. Dolphin presents are thoughtful, multipurpose, sustainably sourced and delivered with panache. We can all learn from them. Mariah Carey may have said that all she wants for Christmas “is you”, but if I have one Christmas wish, it is to receive a sponge-hat-skin-protector thingy from a cetacean who serenades me with style.
