Seasonal kissing and unfortunate penguins

So that’s it then. That was the season to be jolly, and now the thick grey coat of January threatens to envelop our mood. 

But, if you’ll excuse our stubbornness, we are in no mood to leave the party.

Christmas is our absolute favourite time of year. Silly season you might say… perfect for the hard-edges of science to give a little and allow in some of our (potentially annoying – we are the first to admit) whimsy.

So, we thought, let’s try and continue the cheer! Altogether now: T’is (still) the season to be jolly, Fa la la la la, la la la la!

So – we pitched the Editor. More war of attrition than a pitch really… and eventually he begrudgingly gave in to our incessant seasonal jollity and found us something festive to tackle. “Kissing” came the rather stern request. “Kissing… and penguins”. Ok we thought, slightly obscure, but we can put some new-year glitter on those.

As the Editor handed us our brief, all still looked hopeful. But warning bells went off as we read the title of the paper. There is no real way to dress this up – so we are afraid you’ll have to take it as it is.?..

Up first – kissing. And what a strange behaviour it is; thought to have developed from the trait of our ancestors to give offspring food via?mouth-to-mouth regurgitation. Even the most passionate – the most? human?– of kisses, the French kiss, has clear evolutionary origins. It has been suggested that ‘kiss-feeding’ – where the tongue is used to push food from the mouth of the mother to the child – is the obvious candidate. But we digress…regurgitation, in any form, is hardly fodder for new-year jollity.

It’ll come as no real surprise to you, dear readers, that if you were lucky/naughty/drunk (delete as appropriate) enough to find yourself attached at the lips under mistletoe at your xmas do, it won’t be just awkward glances the next morning that you’ll be exchanging. No, the odd bacterium will have taken the opportunity to broaden its horizons and do some inter-mouth travelling. We say the ‘odd bacteria’, but that is to do it no justice at all. A study from back in 2014 suggests that for every 10 second kiss – as many as 80 million bacteria can be transferred from mouth to mouth.

The study, published in?Microbiome, also found that if couples intimately kiss regularly then their salivary microbiota populations become very similar. The researchers, from the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, studied 21 couples by taking oral swabs and asking them to fill out questionnaires. As an interesting sidenote, the researchers point out that 74% of the men reported a higher intimate kiss frequency than the women of the same couple. No real surprise that the tendency of the male human to brag and exaggerate extends to scientific studies.

So ‘salivary microbiota’ and ‘oral swabs’ – that’s jolly, right? Right? Come on everyone, stay with us, we can get through this if we just keep the cheer going.

Take it as it is...

Now, penguins – surely these little snow dwelling tufts of fluffy loveliness won’t let us down? As the Editor handed us our brief, all still looked hopeful. It was a paper from? Polar Biology?– surely the most festive of all journals? Hang on though – warning bells are going off as we read the title of the paper. There is no real way to dress this up – so we are afraid you’ll have to take it as it is.

Multiple occurrences of king penguin sexual harassment by Antarctic fur seals…Fa la la la la, la la la la?

Yes, it does appear as if some amorous seals have rather been taking liberties with their Antarctic neighbours. Study leaders, Nico de Bruyn, and William A. Haddad of the Mammal Research Institute at the University of Pretoria, South Africa confess a befuddlement as to why this might be happening. “If this is learned behaviour, we really can’t think of what the reward may be for these young males, other than perhaps learning that these birds are an easier target to practice their copulatory skills.”

That’s it, we give in. All festive cheer is now extinguished… Happy New Year everyone, may all your oral microbiota have a successful one and all your penguins be safe from enamoured seals.