The month of August is like an early Thursday morning of a given week: Just as Thursday means the week’s coming to a close, August marks the waning of summer. Goldenrod flowers glow in fallow fields, and if you pay it mind, you will feel the first breath of autumn by month’s end.
Daddy longlegs have noticed; come August, the gangly guys and gals have procreation in mind, and begin to gather en masse to mate and prepare to overwinter. Sometimes you’ll find them in aggregations of a few to a few hundred individuals, which helps ensure a greater likelihood of both successful breeding and making it through winter.
Even though they’re also known as shepherd spiders, daddy longlegs are not spiders.
That’s why they are also known as harvestmen — for their gregarious nature at harvest time. They live throughout Ohio, on the farm, in the forest, in the suburbs, in your gardens, and in every corner of every city. And they are good to have around.
But first, here is what they are not: Even though they’re also known as shepherd spiders, daddy longlegs are not spiders. Bug scientists, otherwise known as entomologists, put them in the order Opiliones, which comes from the Latin term for “shepherd,” so named because they resemble shepherds of old who used stilts to rise over their flocks and keep a lookout. Spiders are in the order Araneae. More on that later.
Daddy longlegs are mostly that: long legs. They have a pill-like body that rises well above the ground, lifted by eight stilt-like legs. And those legs are for more than just walking: They are sensory organs — a combination of smell and touch and transportation, all in one.
The legs are also essential for defense, but not the way you might think. Your common garden-variety spiders can make tracks, fast, when threatened, which of course is an effective defense mechanism. Not so for daddy longlegs — they just sort of mosey along. When attacked by a predator such as a bird or a cat (or a spider), they shed a leg. The discarded legs are preprogrammed to wiggle and tremble for maybe as long as an hour, to confuse and throw off the would-be predator while the daddy longlegs ambles on its remaining legs to the shelter of a woodpile or leaf duff. Next time you see a daddy longlegs, take note as to how many legs are missing; the appendages do not grow back. Daddy longlegs may also bob and weave and quiver in the face of a predator, and they throw off a noxious odor.
More differences: While genuine spiders use fangs to inject their prey with toxic venom, daddy longlegs do not produce venom, nor do they have fangs. Instead, they secrete tiny globs of glue to secure live prey, then rip and shred their food, and they are fastidious about it. While spiders weave webs for capturing their prey (araneae is Latin for “a spider’s web”), daddy longlegs lack the talent and the silk glands for such work. Daddy longlegs graze along, eating flower pollen, animal dung, stink bugs, mites, beetle larvae, caterpillars, aphids, and grasshoppers. After meals, they’re known to clean their forelegs by raking their appendages through their mouth.
One more difference between spiders and daddy longlegs: the eyes. Spiders possess acute vision, as they should, having eight eyes. Daddy longlegs have only two eyes, and even those, the entomologists posit, exist mostly to discern light and shadow. It is, after all, through the wafting of legs in the air that daddy longlegs find their way, rather than by sight.
And, oh, by the way, that direction-finding dance may be good for another thing: If you happen to lose a cow, lore has it those waving legs will guide you toward your missing bovine.
