HEY! Don’t you run away from me, you… weird thing.
*pokepokepokepoke*
Ha! There you are.
So, what the hell is this?
I apologize for my n00bness to my 3 or 4 readers out there, but I honestly had no idea of what this was.
In my defense, I grew up turning every rock and rotten tree log in my parent’s land to see what I could find underneath, and I never came across one of these until my 24th spring.
I was seriously frustrated with this thing. It wouldn’t stop moving! I took over 20 pictures of it, and not one of them is a good shot.
So, lets see. It has 8 leggies, so definitely an arachnid. There isn’t a distinct abdomen though, just one chunk of cephalothorax, so maybe it’s more closely related to a scorpion than to a spider.
Hmm, lets look at the butt.
No spinnerets (also know as web spinning things), definitely not a spider.
That’s all I could come up with on my own. But from there it’s pretty easy to find out more on the interwebs. All I had to do is go looking for those creepy looking arachnids that are not spiders nor scorpions and kind of look like failed experiments.
And here it is!
Knowing that they are harvestmen (Opiliones) I searched a little more and once again found myself at Rio de Janeiro National Museum’s ridiculously awesome website. Check this out.
So, according to them,
Opiliones are more closely related to scorpions than to spiders (following Shultz, 1990, but there are different interpretations in that Scorpiones do not even make part of the Arachnida).
AHA!
Who are they?
Laniatores: these are the stout, spiny harvestmen found in the Tropics, which may reach very large size.
Dyspnoi: these are Temperate Old World species, dull-colored and short-legged. Some species may have bizarre ocular ornamentation.
Eupnoi: these are the daddy-longlegs, familiar to Europeans and Americans. They have coriaceous tegument, delicate pedipalps, legs often very thin and long. There is a a myriad of tropical species (Gagrellinae), which may have mettalic shines, intricate honeycomb patterns of granulation, and striped/dotted multicolored hues of blue, red, green, yellow.
Cyphs: these are the minute acari-like Opiliones which were undersampled until the last decades, when intensive studies made them much better known.
It seems like my harvestmen fits the description for the Laniatores suborder.
I haven’t found the exact species, but narrowing something I had never seen before down to the suborder, is good enough for me!
For now :)
HEY! Don’t you run away from me, you… weird thing. by The Bug Lady, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Amazing! It’s like a tiny little crab. Kind of reminds me of a tiny version of the biggest crab in the world!
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/02/crabzilla-5-ft-biggest-known-crab-uk.php
Ahhh mother of god!
Think of all the crab cakes you could make :p
Yeah, you have really strange and awesome opiliones there!! Here, in Europe, they’re all leggy brown little balls, always in the campings waiting for the leftovers of your dinner… ^___^
Ohh, I think I have a picture of one of these leggy brown little balls :)
I found one the size of my hand when I went to Shawnee Park last fall.
I’m going to make a post about it.
…if this kind of arachnids wasn’t cataloged, I would think its some sort of link between crab & a spider, sometimes they have patterns that reminds me some crustaceans like, an it seems you found a really curious & cool one here, anyway , I know I’m not bringing up nothing from ultra science here, but was looking up the content at your nice page, & wanted to leave a comment & say hi, have fun, take care! =)
They really do look like crabs, specially with all those spikes on the big back legs. Did you click the link Vince posted above? They look a lot like that giant crab.
Hmm, I wonder what they taste like.
Right about Laniatores, this one is a gonyleptid
ID at species level is hard for the lack of sources, at least online
At the forests its pretty easy to find some real big ones at night, there is even a report of one (Neosadocus maximus) eating a small treefrog