Beyond the prey: male spiders highly invest in silk when producing worthless gifts

In the spider Paratrechalea ornata, males have two gift-giving mating tactics, offering either a nutritive (prey) or a worthless (prey leftovers) silk wrapped gift to females. Both gift types confer similar mating success and duration and afford males a higher success rate than when they offer no gift. If this lack of difference in the reproductive benefits is true, we would expect all males to offer a gift but some males to offer a worthless gift even if prey are available. To test this, we allowed 18 males to court multiple females over five consecutive trials. In each trial, a male was able to produce a nutritive gift (a live housefly) or a worthless gift (mealworm exuviae). We found that, in line with our predictions, 20% of the males produced worthless gifts even when they had the opportunity to produce a nutritive one. However, rather than worthless gifts being a cheap tactic, they were related to a higher investment in silk wrapping. This latter result was replicated for worthless gifts produced in both the presence and absence of a live prey item. We propose that variation in gift-giving tactics likely evolved initially as a conditional strategy related to prey availability and male condition in P. ornata. Selection may then have favoured silk wrapping as a trait involved in female attraction, leading worthless gift-giving to invade.

The Sustainability of Pre-Service Teachers’ Consumer Behaviour for the December Holidays

The consumer behaviour of Slovenian pre-service teachers for the December holidays and their personal views about sustainable consumption were studied. A total of 130 students of the University of Ljubljana’s Faculty of Education took part in the study. The sample consisted of 11 male and 116 female students, while 3 students did not report their gender. The survey was conducted in January 2020. The results show that 95.4% of the respondents received gifts during their childhood on Saint Nicholas Day, 60.0% at Christmas and 23.1% when celebrating the New Year. Almost 13% of the respondents received gifts three times in December during their childhood. In December 2019, 54.6% of them gave gifts for Saint Nicholas Day, 65.2% at Christmas and 10.8% for the New Year. Christmas has therefore become the most common gift-giving time in December. Students most often give their loved ones sweets, clothes and shoes, and cosmetics. The majority of the respondents spend less than 50% of their monthly income on gifts for the December holidays. In terms of sustainability, the respondents described their consumer behaviour as follows: (1) giving or receiving things they really need, (2) giving or receiving gifts and wrappings made of recyclable material, (3) giving or receiving nonmaterial gifts, (4) reducing the number of gifts, (5) giving for charity, or (6) not giving gifts at all.

The Gift and Open Science

This article illustrates how social structures and behaviours of scientists in the societal sub-system of open science resemble patterns analysed in The Gift, an essay written by Marcel Mauss nearly 100 years ago. The presented analysis goes beyond existing interpretations of gift-giving in science. The latter has mainly focussed on the exchange of knowledge and citations. I argue that The Gift explains also identity, competition, co-opetition, rituals and punishment. Mauss’s Gift is seen as a complementary model to existing economic and sociological approaches regularly used to analyse structures and behaviours in open science. By accentuating such an anthropological approach, I conclude that the Gift provides explanations for the stability and the expansion of the open science community.

It Is My Turn Now: How and Why ‘Single’ Women Complain about Non-Reciprocal Gift-Giving

This article employs the prism of gift-exchange to analyse the marginalised status of singles within social relations. We trace an emerging critique voiced by single women, who challenge the unilateral etiquette of gifting marital and family-making celebrations. While dominant social norms normalise gift-giving at weddings and subsequent family-related occasions, there are no commensurable opportunities for singles to receive back their accumulative investments in the life events of others. Drawing on various online sources, we explore the discursive articulations through which single women highlight the unfairness that underpins their position as constant givers. We show how single women manage the social risks that such public complaints entail, and how they claim to be worthy receivers themselves. This article offers singlehood as a valuable case study for engaging with broader questions concerning reciprocity – specifically, what happens when reciprocal gifting is not an established norm within ostensibly reciprocal social relations.