Daddy Long Legs

READER ALERT! Below are close up photos of spiders. Some people are very squeamish about spiders. If you are afraid or don't like spiders you may want to skip this article. The fear of spiders is called arachnophobia or arachnephobia.



The Daddy Long Legs is not a spider. Look closely to see the two black dots on the orange body. Those are the Daddy Long Leg's eyes.

 I was about four or five years old, when I was putting on a pair of boots to go outside and play in the snow. Looking down into one of the boots I found a Daddy Long Legs marching up and out. It frightened me so badly I threw the boot across the room and ran crying to my mother. It took me a while to overcome my arachnophobia. It is a common fear among many children, but like myself, they soon grow out of it.

Most people call a Daddy Long Legs a spider because it has eight legs and behaves like a spider. But  entomologist won't call it that. Eight legs alone doesn't make a spider. A true spider has two distinct body parts and eight legs - the head and the abdomen. A Daddy Long Legs has three body parts - a head, a thorax and an abdomen. However, these three segments are tightly fused together making them appears as one.

This Daddy Long Legs has only seven legs.

A true spider with eight legs and two clearly distinct body segments.

The Daddy Long Legs is also called a harvestmen. This group of jointed eight-legged creatures are omnivores, meaning they eat both animals and plants.

It is not uncommon to find one or more legs missing on a Daddy Long Legs. Of the four I recently saw, two  had seven legs, one had five and one had eight. That is because a Daddy Long Legs can willing detach a leg from its body if necessary. This helps it escape from predators. When the leg detaches it will twitch - sometimes up to an hour, distracting the predator as the Daddy Long Legs makes it's escape. The missing leg will not grow back.

Watching one closely, you will notice the Daddy Long Legs using its second pair of legs (counting from the front of the head to the back) as antennae, reaching out and touching things as it moves about. This set of  legs are also the longest of all the legs. One Daddy Long Legs I recently saw had a pair with each leg reaching out about three inches. The tips of these legs are very sensitive and relay vital information regarding the Daddy Long Legs environment.

A Daddy long Legs' vision are not quite as sharp as a spider's. It probably because a Daddy Long Legs has only one pair of eyes while a true spider has three or four pairs. 

True spiders will have six to eight eyes. Four eyes are clearly visible on this spider - two large eyes in the front center and two smaller eyes on either side of the center ones.

With only two eyes, one fused body segment and often times less than eight legs, the fast, nimble harvestmen do quite well. You can find them just about anywhere.