When I spied, with my two little eyes this guy staring back at me with its two little eyes, I knew this wasn't your typical spider, since ye ol' spiders have far more than two eyes. Usually four or more. This dude (or dudette) reminded me of a peanut with legs. The difference between it and others was the lack of any other body parts. Just the peanut with legs.
Wikipedia says this about that:
Although superficially similar to and often misidentified as spiders (order Araneae), the Opiliones are a distinct order that is not closely related to spiders.
Once I managed my freak out about the fact that there are creepy crawly things with long legs running around my garden that isn't a supernatural elemental or a spider, I had to find out more.
I couldn't call it Fred or Frederika this time, so I named it Scary Spice since it was sitting on the parsley and it comes from an order (family-ish) of very cool sounding entomology. It turned around, shaking its wee hiney at me too. So it was appropriate.
Scary spice isn't a "Daddy Long Legs" either. That's a different kind of thing. These peanuts with legs are known as "Harvestmen". Again, here's the wikiwalk of that portion of knowledge:
Harvestmen are also referred to as "shepherd spiders" in reference to how their unusually long legs reminded observers of the ways that some European shepherds used stilts to better observe their wandering flocks from a distance.
Did you know about stilt walking shephards? NEITHER DID I!
C'mon ... why aren't these sorts of things shown in Historical Drama? I may start a petition, but I digress.
Evidently these things are everywhere in the world except Antartica. There's not a great deal of things for them to eat on the ice. They will eat other insects and some plant matter, including fungi, which I thought was marvelous since they don't spin webs. They have no silk glands to catch other goodies in a net, although they will sit on a spider web and shake like a proper Spice Girl to attract the resident spinner and then ... well, eat it. Then they find someone to love, lay eggs and do it all over again.
Scary Spice would be a tiny thing without those legs. All in all, I'd say the body was about two centimeters, but those legs. My lord, those legs had to have been at least 1.5 inches if not longer. The good news is that they aren't venomous to humans, at all. They actually "eat" their food too, as opposed to say, sucking down their prey like a gross milkshake.
I honestly never really considered how a common spider nourishes itself. Super gross now that I think on it. Ewwwww ... garden smoothie anyone?
Thank you, so much, for reading and I always welcome your comments!
Take a look at @Labyrinths when you have a moment, and join our labyrinth community on HIVE if you're interested. We just started it, so there's not much going on yet, but if you're ever in the need for a "down to earth" (but not too earthy) psychic, you can find me online at Brigid's Aether.
Any images and graphics (unless noted) are mine.
