Harvestmen
Profile
Harvestmen
Profile, Helper Mouth Parts
| Harvestmen Profile | | Harvestmen Profile, Helper Mouth Parts | | ||
 | Class: | Animals (Animalia) - Jointed Legs (Arthropoda) - Spiders, Scorpions, Mites & Ticks (Arachnida) | |||
| Order: | Harvestmens (Opiliones) | ||||
| Family: | Harvestmen (Neopilionidae) | ||||
| Species: | Harvestmen (Megalopsalis sp) | ||||
| This Photo: | Profile, Long Mouth Part Tips | ||||
| Other names: | Daddy-long-legs, Daddy Long Legs, Daddy Longlegs or Daddy Long-legs | ||||
EXTRA - Photo Specific Information: This specimen is on a blade of grass, so you can see it's quite small. You can also see left eye on top of the body. General Species Information: Found on Ellura (in the Murray Mallee, SA) and elsewhere The Daddy Long-legs name is miss-leading in Australia as we also have Daddy Long-legs spiders, which look very similar, but are quite different. The visible difference between spiders & harvestmen is that harvestmen appear to have one single whole body. Spiders have an obvious distinction between the back (abdomen) & front (thorax). Harvestmen have no spinerets nor venom, but these differences are not visible. The species we have at Ellura looks like it has 12 legs! But it has 8 legs, like a spider, and 2 pairs of mouth parts. Two very long ones look like knees out the front (which are chelicerae), then two smaller helper feeders to their side (which would be palps). The long ones are pointed, while the side ones are rounded & hairy. Shahan Derkarabetian on iNaturalist said "They are always very cool to find. In this family the males have the extremely long chelicerae." | |||||
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