They spend most of their time sitting still in a crevice or under a log – they love shady, humid places, so you might find them in your basement or crawl space. The reasons for this behavior are unknown – scientists hypothesize that it could have to do with maintaining humidity or avoiding predation.ĭespite their namesake long legs, daddy longlegs don’t run around often. Up to 70,000 have been recorded gathering together in a mass that looks like a ball of hair. In case you missed it, Opiliones recently went viral on the internet for their aggregation behavior. Some species of daddy longlegs do, however, secrete chemicals that could be poisonous to small predators – this is not a risk to humans. Unlike spiders they don’t have segmented bodies, they don’t spin webs, and no, they don’t have glands to produce venom or fangs to inject it. Some incredibly well-preserved specimens in amber reveal that the Opiliones have remained largely unchanged for around 400 million years. There are thousands of species of Opiliones around the world on every continent except Antarctica. © Chris Helzer / TNC Daddy LonglegsĪ little background on daddy longlegs (also known as harvestmen) - they are not spiders, but they do belong to the class Arachnida along with spiders and many more eight-legged creatures. Daddy longlegs (Common names for this Order are daddy-longlegs, harvestmen and opilionidi), photographed on a leaf. Warning – if you are arachnophobic, you might want to skip the videos below. There are two groups of arachnids to consider - the true daddy longlegs (of the order Opiliones) and the daddy longlegs spider (of the family Pholcidae). And it’s a slightly more complicated question than I thought. It turns out, I’m not the only one who has wondered about this. However, as an adult my skepticism kicked in and I decided to look into it. Then, one fateful day a friend told me that daddy longlegs are the most venomous spider on earth but they can’t bite people because their fangs are too short.Ĭould this be true? As an arachnophobic kid, I found it likely and spread the word. Not so daddy long-legs when they happened to creep across my foot, I let it be. I have been, for the better part of my life, terrified of spiders (and ticks and most arachnids).
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