The Mystery of the Pile of Legs

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I hope that title caught your attention. It WAS a mystery, and it WAS a pile of legs.  Spindly black legs all piled up on the ground beneath a part of the stucco wall that is often covered with legions of harvestmen, (some people call them daddy longlegs).  I find them congregating in various parts of the deck; sometimes they cluster on the stucco wall, other days I may find them all packed into the corners of the ceiling or hiding behind the water tank.  

 

Harvestmen are nocturnal so their roaming about and hunting for food is something I don’t get to witness, although, a night on the deck with a flashlight might be interesting. The gregarious clumps I see are the way they spend the day. Safety in numbers I suppose but they seem awfully conspicuous and I often wondered if the birds ever found them to be a tasty treat.  This pile of legs seemed to be the answer to that.  I had just recently read a nature article about the Hill Country where the author mentioned that he could tell his wrens had had 4 harvestmen for breakfast by the number of legs strewn about his patio!     

Aha! I have several pairs of wrens in the yard, both Carolina and Bewick’s wrens and for the last month a pair of recently fledged Bewick’s wrens have made the back deck their number one hang out.  They have been endlessly entertaining as they land on the clothesline never expecting it to swing, flapping to keep their balance. They also find sleeping in a straw angel hanging on the post not only the best place for them to hunker down but a proven way to startle me each morning when they fly out.  And most recently, they have found underwear on the line to be the perfect cradle for a nap by day.  Discretion kept me from taking a picture of that!  So, it seems to me that they may be the likely suspects.  Not that that would hold up in court.

Of course, the only really edible part of this creature is its one body part.  In Harvestmen, as in mites or ticks, their head and thorax are fused together and called a cephalothorax. Insects have three body parts and spiders have two.  Although they are included in the Arachnid class, that one, not two, body parts earn them their own Order, Opilliones.  (I love the way that word rolls off the tongue, so very Italian sounding)  It’s hard to imagine getting your fill on this one small body part but I suppose if you eat enough of them it must count for something, for it was a substantial pile of legs.

As a defensive gesture they do have the ability to jettison a leg when trying to evade a predator. And that leg will continue to twitch around for a while distracting the would-be-assailant, but this pile had too many legs to have been caused by that.  I am still putting my money on the wrens.

The harvestmen’s other defense is a pair of scent glands located next to their eye that gives off a foul odor, ostensibly to discourage anything making a meal of them.  “Giving someone the stink eye” could take on a new meaning in this context! For that matter, some people think their mass groupings are for the purpose of really putting out a substantial stench when threatened.  I can’t say I have ever noticed an odor, but then I have never seen them being threatened.  When I get to close to them, they all start gyrating and do an impressive amount of push-ups but that’s all.

Once again, where was the camera?  Not with me, and when I went back the next day the wind had blown all those delicate legs away; the crime scene had vanished.   Now I check daily to look for other signs of feasting but so far, no luck.  Which is why I always say, if you see something out of the ordinary in nature, get excited about it now, for you may never see it again.

By the way, the name harvestmen comes from the fact that, in cooler climes, like the Cape, they are most often seen at harvest time.  Here in Texas, they are my year round companions.  Remember, they are not true spiders ergo; no fangs, no venom and no danger to you.  Plus, they have this amazingly wide diet including aphids that you would be happy to be rid of, decaying vegetation and (no accounting for taste) bird poop, so welcome them if they come, your deck may be cleaner for it!