“I’ve seen females pop the leg off a male because they don’t want to mate with him,” said Kasey Fowler-Finn, who researches daddy longlegs at St. But as with many other species, the females are often bigger and stronger. In some species, males actually wrap their legs around the female’s to keep her in place, and even shake her, during copulation. Mating among these arachnids can get rough too. Predators like small birds and lizards aren’t the only way a daddy longlegs can lose a limb. The tip of the harvestman’s leg is segmented and hooked. After losing two legs, it turns to “bobbing,” where the vertical plane of movement becomes pronounced. Those mechanisms include developing different types of strides more suited to the new leg count.Īfter losing one leg, a daddy longlegs begins to favor “stotting,” where it dribbles its body on the ground like a basketball with every stride. “It’s a very common phenomenon, so you would expect to find compensatory mechanisms.” “They have a 60 percent probability of losing a leg during their lifetime,” Escalante explained. A daddy longlegs that’s missing one, two, or even three legs can recover a surprising degree of mobility by learning to walk differently. In the daddy longlegs’ case, the lost leg doesn’t grow back.īut they persevere. That elegant stride is initially hard-hit by the loss of a leg. Daddy longlegs share this trait with insects, and have what scientists call the “alternate tripod gait,” where three legs touch the ground at any given point. Two of their appendages have evolved into feelers, which leaves the other six legs for locomotion. Daddy longlegs, a.k.a harvestmen, have generated a lot of misinformation.Ī daddy longlegs grooms one of its appendages. But at Nerd Nite he’ll spend a good deal of time myth-busting on his favorite topic. The motto of East Bay Nerd Nite, which takes place on the last Monday of the month at Club 21 in Oakland, is “Be there and be square.”Įscalante’s research focuses on autonomy in daddy longlegs and how it affects their long term survival. More than 100 cities worldwide host nerd nights on a regular basis. And it’s just one of the topics Escalante will be broaching in his presentation at East Bay Nerd Nite next month.Ī “nerd night,” if you hadn’t heard, is an evening of talks, usually in a bar, generally unrelated to each other, that are part lecture, part rant.
It’s called autotomy, the voluntary release of a body part. The only blood lost comes from the detached leg.
Whether it hurts is up for debate, but most scientists think not, given the automatic nature of the defense mechanism. It’s a way to stay alive in the wild if something is trying to devour the bug’s limb. A gentle pinch is enough to trigger an internal system that discharges the leg. Photo by Josh Cassidy/KQEDĭaddy longlegs’ appendages don’t need to be pulled off because these arachnids, related to spiders, drop them deliberately. Daddy longlegs’ rope-like limbs make the creatures excellent climbers.
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