February 8, 2007: Thousands of daddy-long-leggers
 

http://cellar.org/2007/thousands-of-spiders.jpg

From Neatorama via Something Awful comes this horrible, horrible image, of a clump of these spider-like things - whatever they are. There seems to be some controversy over whether they're spiders or what, but I'm not sticking around long enough to figure it out in detail, thank you very much.

Looks like a patch of pubes....

Wonder how they taste (spiders, not pubes)?

These are commonly called "harvestmen" and they do congregrate like this occasionally, although I've never seen that amount of concentration.

Daddy long legs. *memories*
Anyone who has camped around here is intimately familiar with them, as they get into everything. You just grab them by a leg and fling 'em into your neighbors campsite. Or, if you are a pre-pubecent male, pull 1/2 the legs off of one side and watch the poor thing scoot around in a circle. :rolleyes:

I always thought they were spiders, but my 2nd grade daughter explained to me patiently last summer that they are not spiders. Kids today are so freaking smart. Anyway, I like daddy long legs. They are cool. I'm always careful around them because they seem so delicate.

Daddy-Long-Legs
HYG-2060B-04
Susan C. Jones, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Entomology
Extension Specialist, Household & Structural Pests


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Daddy-long-legs, also known as harvestmen, are very commonly confused with spiders due to their general appearance and eight legs. However, these tan to brown creatures belong to the order Opiliones and are not spiders, all of which belong to the order Araneae. Although they are close relatives of spiders, daddy-long-legs do not bite humans, and they are not poisonous (they lack venom glands). They do not construct webs.


Class: Arachnida
Order: Opiliones
Common name: Daddy-long-legs or harvestmen Identification
Daddy-long-legs have eight very long, slender legs, although some species have shorter legs. They have an oval, compact, small body (1/16 to 1/2 inch long) that is held well above the ground by the thread-like long legs. Their body appears to be a single unit because the cephalothorax (combined head and thorax) and abdomen are broadly joined (no narrow waist), whereas spiders have a constriction between the cephalothorax and abdomen. Daddy-long-legs should not be confused with cellar spiders, which are found in cobwebs in dark, damp basements, cellars, and crawl spaces. Although cellar spiders have long legs, their body has a constricted waist (see HYG-2060).

As arachnophobic as I am, I am not afraid of daddy long legs. However, that pic of thousands of them has me rethinking my viewpoint. Eeeek :speechls:

They're not what we call daddy long legs. We reserve that name for crane flies, which have wings. And lord do they use them on late summer evenings when they find their way in through windows and bump about the room....

I wouldn't be happy to see that amount of anything though - every time I look at the picture it's giving me goosebumps.

From here:

Kill 'em with fire. Its the only way to be sure.

that's a mosquito hawk

It reminds me of those magnetic toys where you use the magnet to guide the metal particles over the picture of a man to form a beard and hair.

Close up (warning: big)

I was all set to point out that they showed on Mythbusters that they do bite humans... but it turns out that on the show they were testing cellar spiders, not harvestmen (which are both sometimes called Daddy-long-legs, supposedly, but I'd only ever heard of the harvestmen being called that.)

Just the term cellar spiders makes me cringe, no offense to cellar dwellars.

GAH!!

And yes, I can read. Holy moly! What an awesome picture. My new wallpaper. I will never need to lock my keyboard again--no one will come near it.

o/t, I want a camera with that kind of macro capability. Whoa.

At that size, you can just pretend it's a lobster.