While we’re looking at weird arachnids…
Here is one from Illinois!
I found this guy last fall when I was at the Shawnee Park. It was about the size of my hand. The legs are so long and skinny, it just looks like a levitating bug ball. Harvestmen are pretty cool little creatures.
If you’re one of my friends from Brazil, you might have never seen one of these before. They are closely related to those tiny and skinny spider things that have really long legs that we often find crawling on the walls (those spider things are often not spiders at all). In English they are commonly called daddy-long-legs. (I would love to know why they are called daddy-long-legs, and not mommy-long-legs, or anything else :p)
I was trying to find out what species it is, but apparently there are 1300 species in the Sclerosomatidae family, which appears to be this guy’s family. So I’m going to discreetly abandon the subject for now :p
While we’re looking at weird arachnids… by The Bug Lady, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Tags: arachnid, Arthropod, harvestmen, Opiliones
Hey, beautiful photo! Somehow it seems to me a little “TimBurtonesque” ^___^
Well, nowadays I see those “leggy balls” endearing, but when I was a child they gave me the thrills! We used to go on vacation to a little village in the mountains, and in the camping and all around the green grass there were millions of this guys looking for bits of our dinner and rests of rotten food to eat. And if you forget the door of your tent open, in ten minutes you can have three or four of them trying to crawl into the tent… the little nuisances!
Also they used to stick around by dozens altogether in the exterior walls of the buildings, spreading their long legs flat on the wall. And I used to avoid those walls like the pest! Ha ha, poor things… they really don’t bite or sting, they are completely harmless. I think people aren’t fond of them because their ridiculous wiry long legs, and also because they look like spiders!