yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Are Daddy Longlegs Spiders? (Re: 8 Animal Misconceptions Rundown)


2m read
·Nov 7, 2024

In my animal misconceptions video, I casually mentioned that daddy long legs aren’t spiders and received a ton of comments asking for clarification or suggesting that it’s not that simple. So I feel the need to clear things up a bit. But first, a disclaimer: If images of spiders make you uncomfortable, 1) you shouldn’t have clicked on this video, and 2) you should stop watching, right about now.

Cutest spider ever. Right? When editing the video, I decided to cut out a daddy-longleg discussion, and now you’ll see why. To answer the question ‘are daddy longlegs spiders?’ we first need to know, what are spiders? And for that, we need the biological classification system you should have learned in high school.

Spiders are in the animal kingdom – which is a pretty broad class of life and not helpful in narrowing things down. The phylum that concerns us are the arthropods, which are a subset of animals with external skeletons, segmented bodies, and jointed limbs. The arthropods with exactly eight legs and two body segments are in a class called arachnids – where the name arachnophobia comes from.

And while often used to mean fear of spiders, there are plenty of arachnids that are not spiders, such as scorpions and mites. The true spiders are a subset of arachnids in the order Araneae. What defines these as spiders are their fangs and the poison glands within them, their numerous eyes, and their spinnerets that allow them to make webs.

Now that we have a spider checklist, on to the second problem: the name ‘daddy longlegs’ means different things in different places. In Australia, this cellar spider is called a daddy longlegs – which, as an eight-legged, multi-eyed, web-spinning member of Araneae, makes it an official spider. It also produces venom, but then so does everything in that bloody country.

Where I grew up, this is a daddy longlegs (sometimes called a harvestman). They have just two soulless eyes, can’t web-sling, and lack fangs and poison glands, and so fail the spider checklist. They are in a different order called Opiliones. It was these I had in mind while making the video.

To make things more complicated, in my adoptive UK, the British call this Crane Fly daddy longlegs. Unlike the closely related Opiliones and Araneae, the Crane Fly isn’t an arachnid but an insect, the class of arthropods with six legs and three body segments. And, as if the name wasn’t ambiguous enough at this point, there is also a plant called daddy longlegs.

For taxonomical completeness, the plant is over here a different kingdom. But because of the way life works, even this plant is distantly related to those other daddy longlegs because plants and animals are both eukaryotes, which means that their cells have complex structures, most notably a nucleus.

So, to fully answer the first question: there are four daddy longlegs, three animals, two arachnids, but only one spider among them.

More Articles

View All
Reframing Black History and Culture | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic
[Music] I’m Deborah Adam Simmons, executive editor for history and culture at National Geographic. You’re listening to In Conversation, a special episode exploring black history and culture. [Music] Hey, Deborah! Welcome to Overheard. Hi, Amy! Thanks! I…
Relationships between scientific ideas in a text | Reading | Khan Academy
Hello readers, this is Professor Mario Molina, a scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Now, I’m going to use the example of Professor Molina to teach us about connections, or drawing connections between scientific information in a text, in a pi…
Deadly Conservation | Explorer
[Music] There are a multitude of issues that are impacting Barunga, 4 million people living just a day’s walk away from the park’s border, and those people have nothing but nature to rely on. So that obviously puts an enormous amount of pressure on the pa…
Why Vulnerability is Power | Priceless Benefits of Being Vulnerable
After his brother renounced the throne, Bertie unexpectedly became king. He faced the difficult task of ruling a country on the verge of World War II. Due to his crippling stammer, which caused him much personal discomfort and embarrassment, Bertie mainta…
THIS is what it will cost to fight Climate Change
But I know you. You focus on the big picture, what’s practical. So when you look at what it’s going to take globally to fight climate change in terms of who has the money, what their motivations are, and what exactly it’s going to take to unlock those fun…
Representing solutions using particulate models | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
The goal of this video is to help us visualize what’s going on with the solution at a microscopic level, really at a molecular level, and also to get practice drawing these types of visualizations because you might be asked to do so depending on the type …