Harvestman?

I was looking through my June pictures and noticed this fella in there. The picture seemed pretty good, so my plan was to talk a little about the species. I was a little surprised to find that not only does the picture lack a species identification in iNaturalist, but nobody would even confirm that this is a harvestman. Despite this lack of an authoritative identification, I've chosen to blunder ahead and talk about what I'm pretty sure this is.

Part of the lack of an ID may be related to the name I had for these arthropods when I was growing up; we called them daddy longlegs. Unfortunately the daddy longlegs name is overused to the point of being almost useless. People use it to refer to not only harvestmen (non-spider arachnids), but also cellar spiders (which actually are spiders) and crane flies (which are winged insects). (Admittedly they all have long legs.)

Crane flies may share a name with the two types of arachnids, but with 6 legs and a pair of wings they're unlikely to be confused with the arachnids. The differences between the harvestmen and the cellar spiders can be harder to spot though, especially if they're small and possibly moving/hiding. The main thing is that spider bodies (including cellar spiders) have both a cephalothorax (head and thorax are the same body part) and an abdomen, while harvestmen have all these body parts fused into one. Harvestmen also have only 1 pair of eyes while cellar spiders have 3-4 pairs, but usually it's even harder to see eyes than it is major body parts.

The fella below looks to me like it's got only 1 fused head-thorax-abdomen, which is why I'm pretty confident that this is a harvestman despite the lack of an ID in iNaturalist. (FWIW, I've posted 6 harvestmen pictures going back 4 years and not a single one has been IDed.)

June 10, 2021 at Duke Farms
Photo 136368871, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)


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