Harvestmen at Harvest time

 Fall on the Cape meant the return of “Project Life” at our Nature center.  A time when we would teach various grade levels about the pond, forest and marsh.  I loved the Forest program in the fall when we would take the kids out into the woods for a 2-hour field trip looking for all the signs of nature we had been teaching them about in the classroom.  And one thing you could always count on was, a preponderance of harvestmen, “daddy long legs”, covering the fallen logs, looking to find a sweet someone before life just got too cold for an arthropod to bear.

Now here in Texas, I was dazzled my first year by the presence of hundreds and hundreds of a Texas species of harvestmen hanging out in huge clusters in every corner of my overhanging porch. 

And then this year, there was maybe a 1/10^th of the amount and lately even they have disappeared.

However, coming back from a dog walk the other day, I caught sight of a gyrating landscape out of the corner of my eye.  We went over to check it out, Tuck and I, and there were hundreds of harvestmen covering the trunk of a juniper, plus the ground around it and filling an old armadillo hole at the base of this tree. Wow!  So this is where they have been hanging out!  Or, at least it is where they were that day.

But why they were all in such an excited state in the middle of the morning I can’t say.  Harvestmen here do a lot of bouncing up and down on their legs, usually as a way to scare away would be predators and confuse them as to which part is the yummy body and which is just a tangle of less tasty, stilt- like legs.  I had seen the mass bouncing from a distance, but maybe they had seen the dog and I and we were to blame.  Or maybe some other danger was afoot.  But it gives me a good excuse to tell you a few cool things about “daddy longlegs” for in this season you are likely to stumble upon them too.

First of all, if I had a dollar for every child who told me how incredibly venomous they were and we would all be dead except their teeth are too short to puncture our skin, I would be able to fly back to the Cape whenever I wanted.  No, they are not venomous at all.  They are not spiders either; where spiders have 2 body parts, they’re two are fused into one.  Spiders have multiple eyes, harvestmen only have two; spiders inject venom into their prey to turn them into something they can suck out through their straw-like mouthparts, harvestmen chew their food. Harvestmen neither have venom nor silk glands, no web making or flying through the air on a strand of silk, walking is their only way of getting around.

If you do watch one walking, watch how they use their second set of “legs” which are longer than the others as a blind man would use a cane, tap-tapping their way, sensing what is out there.  And if you see one “bobbing” as these do then note that it makes it a little harder to see its body.  Admire them for the fact that this particular body shape and style has served them well for over 410 million years.  Why change a good thing?  And, as this is a family friendly blog, I will simply say that, anatomically, the males are more like males than you think of in an arthropod.

And, last couple of cool facts, they can chose to voluntarily loose a leg to a predator and that leg will keep twitching for up to an hour to keep the focus on the gyrating leg while the rest of the daddy long legs makes its escape.  Think of it like having a pace maker in the leg that keeps it pumping even after the rest of the body is gone.  And, males are the ones to care for the young, and the better the caregiver; the more females are attracted to him.  How his reputation for superior childcare gets passed around I don’t know, but go “DADDY” long legs, maybe that’s how the “daddy” part of the name came to be.

So, even though if feels NOTHING like fall here in TX, I have the harvestmen to make me feel at home.  IF I can find them again, for subsequent checks of that tree and hole have turned up nothing.  Cache this under, another natural history mystery!