Like the spiders, daddy longlegs are arachnids.
They look a bit like spindly spiders but are instantly recognizable by their ridiculously long legs.
A closer look shows that there is no narrow waist as in spiders and that cephalothorax and abdomen are broadly joined.
A really close look reveals that the abdomen is segmented.
Daddy longlegs have stink glands, but you have to get close to smell them.
Many large, hairy spiders of the tropics and subtropics are called tarantulas.
But this name, derived from the city of Taranto in southern Italy, was originally applied only to a European spider, not related to the big, hairy “tarantulas.”
The bite of the European tarantula was believed to cause a disease, known as tarantism, that caused people to break into a frenzied dance.
There is no truth in this, but during the 15th to 17th centuries, tarantism hysteria led people who imagined that they had been bitten by a tarantula to dance to exhaustion as they did the tarantella.
The tarantella a frenetic dance that they believed to be both a symptom of and a cure for tarantism.
Arachnophobia is a morbid and abnormal fear of spiders.
Among the animal phobias, it is second in frequency of occurrence only to the fear of snakes.
An evolutionary reason for phobias, such as arachnophobia, and a fear of animals remains unresolved.
One theory is that the presence of venomous spiders led to the development of a fear of spiders especially easy.
The brown recluse spider is commonly found outdoors and a person could be bitten while working in the garden or turning over a rock.
But this spider is more likely to occur indoors than is the black widow.
It might hide in piles of paper, clothing, bedding, or a shoe.
People have been bitten when they roll over onto a brown recluse in bed.
The majority of bites are inflicted on men or boys sitting in an outdoor privy, or pit toilet.
Black widows sometimes spin their web just beneath the hole in the seat, often a good place to catch flies.
If the unfortunate person’s penis dangles in the web, the female spider rushes to attack; presumably in defense of her egg sacs, which are attached to the web.
The bite of the black widow may cause severe muscular pain, a board-like rigidity of the abdomen, tightness in the chest, difficulty in breathing, and profuse sweating and nausea.
Death rarely occurs.
In the case of the brown recluse, a local necrosis, an area of dead tissue, forms at the site of the bite.
Other symptoms occur only rarely and fatalities are extremely rare.
Spiders copulate or reproduce in a very unusual way.
They have evolved the nicety of internal fertilization, but since the males don’t have a penis, they use their pedipalps, the arm-like “feelers” adjacent to the mouth, to place their sperm into the body of the female.
The tip of the pedipalp, which works like a rubber-bulb syringe, is the intromittent organ.
Before a male seeks out a female, he sucks his pedipalps full of semen that he has deposited from the true genital opening at the base of his abdomen onto a small silken web that he has spun ahead of time.
If he survives the courtship, he thrusts a pedipalp into one of the female’s two genital openings and squirts in his semen.
Normally the black widow and the brown recluse commonly bite people.
The black widow occurs in southern Canada and every state of the continental United States except Alaska.
The brown recluse occurs in the central region of the United States from Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa south to the Gulf states, and also in Arizona and California.
The female black widow, the dangerous sex, is shiny black with red markings, usually in the shape of an hour glass on the underside of her abdomen.
She is about one-half inch long.
The brown recluse female is as much as one-half inch long, has very long legs, and is brown in color with a dark violin-shaped marking on the cephalothorax.
Approaching a female is a very risky business for a male spider.
He is much smaller then she is and cannot very well defend himself against her.
She may mistake him for a prey animal and kill him before he can so much as touch her. Spiders have evolved two main ways of placating females during courtship: visual signals and telegraphic signals.
Visual signals are used by hunting spiders, spiders that do not spin webs, and are at their epitome in the little jumping spiders, which have very large eyes and apparently considerable visual acuity.
The males are very conspicuous in appearance and movement, so as to better let the female know that they are a potential mate and not a meal.
A male jumping spider is likely to be gaudier than the female, to have colorful, swollen pedipalps, to have his face adorned with tufts of hair, and to have long front legs that are gaudily ornamented with spots of bright color, spines, and fringes of colored hair.
The male approaches a female in a ritualized dance, moving forward a step at a time with his front legs raised as he jerks his body and waves his pedipalps. If she is receptive, she will let the male crawl on her body, otherwise, she signals rejection by jerking her body up and down.
Male web-spinning spiders must cross the female’s web to mate with her. This puts them in great danger.
When a female feels her web twitch, she rushes across it, hurls herself on the entrapped prey, and quickly injects it with venom before it can break away.
She could easily mistake an approaching male for a meal.
Consequently, a male forewarns the female of his presence by plucking a strand of her web in a code that she will innately recognize. He moves towards her cautiously and will soothingly stroke her body.
Nevertheless, if the male does not hurry away after inseminating the female, he is likely to be eaten.
A particular wolf spider from Europe, Pisaura, placates the female in an altogether different way than do jumping spiders and web spinners.
Before looking for a female, he catches a fly or some other insect, and instead of eating it, wraps it in silk. When he finds a female, he offers her this “sac lunch.”
If she accepts it, he inseminates her as she eats.
The biggest spider in the world is big enough to cover a dinner plate.
The largest known spiders are the Goliath bird-eating spiders of the coastal rain forests of northeastern South America.
The largest one known, a male collected by a scientific expedition in Venezuela, had, according to the Guinness Book of Records, a leg span of over 11 inches.
According to the same source, the heaviest bird-eating spider known, a female captured in Surinam in 1986, weighed a colossal 4.3 ounces.
That big a spider could easily subdue a bird.
Most birds are much smaller.
Wood warblers generally weigh only about 0.35 ounces, a scarlet tanger about one ounce, and a bird as large as a bluejay only about 3.5 ounces.
