A daddy-longlegs possesses six eyes, including two vestigial pairs | Hacker News Reader

A daddy-longlegs possesses six eyes, including two vestigial pairs

nytimes.com

119 pointsfurcyd107 comments

Note that even though Opiliones aren't spiders, Pholcidae - which are also commonly called daddy longlegs - definitely are. This article is about Opiliones.

Also note that in the UK, daddy long legs refers to Crane Flies, which is neither of those.

Not just the UK, there are parts of the southern US that refer to Crane Flies as DLLs (also "mosquito hawks" even though they don't prey on mosquitos). You also sometimes hear "Grand Daddy Longlegs".

I can vouch for New Orleans at least as they are everywhere right now (there was a discussion on r/NewOrleans just a few days back about this very topic). One thing I learned in that discussion is the same person might call both of them DLLs. That seems impossibly illogical to me but it apparently happens.

So basically you're living in DLL hell ;)

Take your upvote and get out of here.

sigh.. this is HN, not reddit. I come here so i dont have to navigate this noise between signals

And yet, you create more noise.

"If we are supposed to be quiet, when why are you talking?"

RIP /., RIP r/prog, RIP HN

we need a "you must be this substantive to ride the ride" gate-keeper because shame isnt a good enough moderator anymore.

we just need the next place, so the cycle can continue. it is far easier to ride the waves than to fight the ocean.

Just to add to the common name list - I grew up in Alaska and we called the crane flies "mosquito eaters" there.

Definitely learned the name "'skeeter eater" growing up, but I'm not sure whether that was a Virginian regionalism or my dad's eccentricity.

Were also called mosquito hawks or mosquito eaters in Southern California. Looking back, grandparents were actually from Oklahoma, so I now have no idea if it was regional or just us. Daddy Long Legs are Cellar Spiders here though. For sure.

California raised, but my father who taught me the name mosquito eater was Southern.

I don’t want to hear any evidence that it’s not completely factual. In my worldview it’s real.

Crane flies are vegetarian and harmless for animals. Robber flies are specialized predators of other flies, so: mosquito eaters. Different evolutionary lines.

We could say that crane flies are like insect equivalent of cranes and robber flies are like hawks. In fact they are called hawk flies also.

My cat has been catching and eating craneflies. He's been enjoying the glut of flying snacks!

Bumper crop of mosquito hawks in Houston too. Maybe it was the mild winter?

Interesting! I always just thought they were the males of whatever the local mosquito species was. I'll stop killing them now.

Yeah they don't bite and don't make noise either. And they stay away from humans so they don't buzz around your head at night.

I kill mosquitoes but not the crane flies. Or silverfish which I have in my place a lot. They're harmless.

Silverfish can eat cotton, linen, and silk, so they can do damage.

Biggest issue I have with them is eating the binding glue in paperback books; they go nuts for that stuff.

I didn't know. Pretty much all my clothes and bedding are made of cotton but I never noticed. They're not like moths, if they eat it it is very little.

Maybe they eat dust as well though and my house is pretty dusty so there's that :)

i don't know what the ones near you are like but 100% of the crane flies i've ever crossed paths with fly straight into my face like a moth to a flame. they're harmless but they're extremely annoying.

If you have books and cherish them, you need to kill the silverfish.

Also note in New Orleans, Daddy Longlegs is a nice man who can remove bad juju from a customer for a fee using that dark Tom Cruise witchcraft.

Am I the only one who was taught that crane flies where male mosquitos?

We have three species named daddy long legs? Why are humans like this?

You're not going to believe it when I tell you about how we name people and places. ;)

That's why the scientific Latin names were created. The robin in North America (Turdus migratorius) was named after a similar looking one that settlers were familiar with in Europe (Erithacus rubecula) and there are many cases where similar namespace collisions for animals and plants occur in daily language.

Unfortunately also many of the scientific Latin names have been given rather carelessly.

Linnaeus is one of the worst offenders. He has taken most of his names from classic Latin and Greek authors, like Pliny the Elder and Aristotle, but especially for the Greek names it appears that he has not actually read the original ancient books, or at least he has read them very superficially.

The result is that a very large number of names of animals and plants given by Linnaeus have been applied to very different species than those for which they had been used traditionally.

The genus of harvestmen Phalangium, which is the subject of this research is one of the animals misnamed by Linnaeus.

Aristotle has used 2 words for naming spiders, one for the spiders that make webs ("arachnee") and the other was "phalangion". The description of the latter corresponds to a wolf spider (which is now named "Lycosa", scientifically).

Instead of using "Phalangium" for wolf spiders, Linnaeus has wrongly applied it to harvestmen. There are no closer similarities between spiders and harvestmen than between spiders and any other arachnids, except that both spiders and harvestmen have relatively long legs for their bodies.

When looking at harvestmen it is very easy to see that they are not spiders, because their abdomen is not separated from the thorax and they do not have the poisonous "fangs" characteristic for spiders.

The ancestors of spiders and harvestmen were already separated during Silurian, at a time when the ancestors of humans and fish were not yet separated.

"Naming things is hard" seems to be a universal truth.

DaddyLonglegsManager

AbstractDaddyLongLegsConfigDispatcherServletInitializer

Composition is better than inheritance. So I refactored this into a ListConfigDispatcherServletInitializer which can accept a list of ConfigStrategies for dispatching.

Added AbstractDaddyLongLegsConfigStrategy, to help with implementing concrete config strategies for DaddyLongLegs.

Factory()

The C. elegans roundworm is one of the most important model organisms in biology. I have to specify "roundworm", because, well...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._elegans_(disambiguation)

Not only anthropoids...

https://www.historyhit.com/the-extraordinary-daddy-long-legs...

Others have commented that in Britain the name refers to a fly, but this article about a railway in Great Britain makes it clear it was named after the spider. The devolution of language is fascinating.

Not really. I've just read the article. The two terms seem to be just alternatives.

What kind of a name is that in the first place!!

They do have long legs compared to their body size, so the name is not entirely inaccurate. Unlike guinea pigs or elephant shrews.

This reminds me that gen alpha has a whole different experience here lol

People are free to say opilion, tipula or spider. Is much easier to remember and write than daddysomething

Thanks for clearing that up for me. When I was a kid we had the bumbly non-spider ones in the garden, but now we've got the sinister spider ones in every corner of the basement and garage. I guess the leg thing is convergent evolution?

Though I'm not a particularly big fan of them, the Pholcidae spiders are very nonintrusive, nonaggressive, nearly weightless and paper-thin, and do an excellent job eating venomous spiders and unwanted insects. I tend to leave them undisturbed in out-of-the-way corners when possible.

This is my policy as well. If one comes rappelling down on me in my basement I tend to just blow on them so they fly away elsewhere. Every one of them that eats earwigs can stay as far as I'm concerned.

I used to kill them mercilessly, until I saw like three "outdoor" spiders ending up as meals in their webs in my apartment within days of each other. I have since left them to their own devices. I am not a big fan of spiders, but these critters are really effective pest controls.

FWIW, they tend to not rebuild webs in places where they got destroyed repeatedly, so if you can do that without killing the spider, it will likely move to a more quiet location. Their webs - I learned at the time - are not sticky, unlike most other spider species' webs, and they do not tear down and rebuild them, rather they extend them over time and happily take over abandoned webs.

Yep, these are friend-spiders, if you don’t like spiders. Same as jumping spiders. They eat other spiders! What more could somebody want?

These spiders have decided to live life with PvP mode on, very cool.

Opiliones are what we call Daddy Longlegs in the midwest. The spider ones we call house spiders, or attic spiders.

Fun fact - Daddy longlegs smell - interesting - when you pick them up. It's not bad, but it's not good. It's. Different. It smells how you would design mint if you had only smelled chewing gum instead of the plant.

Not sure what chemical it is that makes them mint flavored.

According to Wikipedia, all species have stink glands, but I have never noticed any smell about them. They sometimes will eject a leg when handled, and the leg will continue twitching for a while, similar to what some lizards do.

They have a musky scent for sure. It's far more noticeable when you encounter a clump of opiliones. I can't say Ive ever smelled anything minty though.

> Not sure what chemical it is that makes them mint flavored.

So, do they taste like mint too? ;)

Interesting… in California, it is reversed… we call Pholcidae ‘daddy long legs’ and Opiliones we call harvestmen.

I grew up in Seattle and we call Opiliones daddy long legs, and we didn't have a name for Pholcidae, the first time I ever saw one was in Hawaii under a couch as an adult.

Does it smell like a stinkbug/coriander? I confess I've handled daddy longlegs my entire life but never thought to smell them lol.

No, not really. It smells pleasant, like mint gum.

I've never been brave enough to chew one up, though.

So does that make them mint-flavoring-flavored?

Thanks for this! I was looking at Wikipedia for daddy longlegs and was confused when it said pholcidae were spiders.

That had me seriously confused as to what they could be talking about, because I've seen how many eyes daddy longlegs have.

I've never really encountered that common name applied to harvestmen, so presumably that's a regional thing from some other region.

Fascinating seeing species selecting and then rejecting additional eyes, probably because they can combine functionality into a single organ pair and reduce the overall “cost” to achieve similar results. Additional eyes in spiders typically have different vision functions: near/far, narrow/peripheral, motion, color. Our mammal eyes package that all up in a single pair.

A fun related fact is that many reptiles have a third eye that’s like a “light sensor” used to track daylight. Its function is linked to their cold-bloodedness, and basically triggers their diurnal cycles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parietal_eye

Reminds me of Tesla removing ultra sound sensors (USS) from their cars and moving all sensory input to their camera systems instead.

Tesla could do this, because at initial strges, they relied on Lidar, Radar and other high precision, specialized sensors, because they were used for mapping the terrain. After millions miles driven, these sensors no longer need to serve their mapping purpose, because the areas have already been mapped & safe passages have been created. Just like a real, experienced driver, who knows the roads, all they need are Motion Sensors, GPS for correction & depth sensing color cameras, for handling infrequent dynamic scenarios.

The point of self-driving is to eventually be better than humans at handling the unexpected because humans are LOUSY at handling the unexpected.

I want my car to be able to see through the fog, rain or snow because it has better "eyes" than I do. I want my car to notice that train I'm about to run into because the sun glare is preventing me from seeing it. I want my car to have noticed the quick moving motorcycle behind me that's overtaking in a lane to my right where it shouldn't be.

A self-driving car that is vision-only cannot get there.

Buy the legacy lidar technology from Tesla and sell it to the military. They'd want superior vehicles.

I mean, a vision-only car could still be superhuman at driving through better processing and alertness, and having cameras pointed in all directions at all times. Remember that the bar is pretty low.

(But yeah, dumping LIDAR seems not to have worked well.)

Tesla did it to save costs. The world is not static, you can’t map it once and expect that to be enough.

Yeah, I remember Tesla's "who needs LIDAR" announcement coming in the middle of a pandemic supply chain crunch, especially from chips needed for those LIDAR arrays.

You remember incorrectly. Tesla have never used LIDAR except for training on specific developer cars. Elon has said from day one LIDAR is an expensive waste because of the compute requirements and latency. They did remove the parking ultrasonic sensors, which at one point were used as a close proximity, low speed auxiliary data source in FSD.

The mandate of FSD has always been that humans get away with driving using only their vision so it must be possible for a computer to do the same. If you have used FSD lately it's largely there.

Thank you for this, human memory is indeed an unreliable thing.

After millions miles driven, these sensors no longer need to serve their mapping purpose, because nothing ever changes?!

Tesla cars do not have a database of mapped roads. Every road is new to the car every time you drive down it. The Tesla self-driving system is incapable of learning on its own. Also they don't produce a persistent 3D representation of the surroundings, in fact every loop in their vision system they throw away the old representation and rebuilds it. This is why everything jitters when you look at the display which represents what the car sees. It's also it's fallacy, and why Tesla will be left in the dust soon enough.

Harvestman, for people to whom a daddy-longlegs is a crane fly (en-GB?).

In Germany, they are called Weberknechte, at least where I live. I recall reading they have a variety of nicknames in different parts of the country.

"Weberknecht" can be translated as "weaver's journeyman". "Opa Langbein" (gramps longleg) is another common one, analogous to the English colloquial name.

In the PNW we call 'em daddy longlegs, and it's pretty common to call crane flies mosquito eaters. Even though they don't.

In Texas growing up we called craneflies mosquito-hawks and the oft repeated fallacy was that they hunted mosquitos

"Daddy longlegs" is a weird name that seems to apply to at least a few bugs.

In the southeastern US where I grew up, yeah, it's a thing with wings that I think are more precisely referred to as crane flies.

Harvestmen exist in that part of the world, but are much less common, and so I never learned to use the "daddy longlegs" name for them.

Yeah, I know of 3 insects that have been called "daddy long legs." There are pholcidae (cellar spiders), tipuloidea (crane flies as you mentioned), and opiliones (harvestmen).

My personal opinion is that harvestmen are the true daddy long legs. Odd to hear you say that they're less common where you are. I grew up in Tennessee, which is essentially the same region, and they were everywhere. They were all over my house growing up, and were the cause of many childhood traumas lol. I know some people don't mind them, but they're the stuff of nightmares for me, I hate them probably more than any other insect.

In western KY, west TN, northern MS, the long legged things with wings are gollywoppers or candleflies. Daddy longlegs are the spiders. It was a right of passage growing up to learn how to pick them up by one leg and the weight of their body meant that they couldnt grab on to anything with their other legs. Unfortunately it was common for them to lose a leg in the process.

Southern MS here (Hattiesburg). The winged things were definitely the main thing called "Daddy longlegs" there.

Eastern Arkansas was the same - daddy longlegs referred to the house spiders.

I live in Florida. I never knew about another other than the spider version of "Daddy long legs" until now.

I’ve from the southeast and a daddy long leg is a spider.

Dang! ... Who ate the middle out of the daddy longlegs?

https://ifunny.co/picture/dang-who-ate-the-middle-out-of-the...

I have been fascinated with pholcidae my entire life on the west coast because every house i've ever been in has been inhabited peacefully by them.

when I go to the east coast i'm always trying to find opiliones to look at knowing that they're the 'regional daddies', but i've never been successful finding one.

At this point I just presume either they're a bit more rare, or everyone on the east coast keeps tidier attics/crawl-spaces.

In rural Georgia they were just outside wandering around in my otherwise meadowish yard with lots of wild plants among the grass. I think I remember finding them just outside my house, so they may have preferred walls or shade, but they weren’t the inside or even necessarily crawlspace kind of arthropod.

More species on HN! More shameless plugs. The nomenclature of these animals is curated in our open-source TaxonWorks. The result of that work is shared on a custom site via exports and post-processing https://www.wcolite.com/.

Spiders seem so cool from a biological perspective, I wish I didn’t have a phobia of them :(

There is more than one creature that is colloquially called "daddy longlegs", such as the crane fly.

Vestigial eyes not really "extra", but still cool.

I think it's foolhardy to assume they are vestigial. Did they test other spectrums such IR, UV, etc? Did they test other phenomenon such as muons? Evolution wouldn't have put something there if it didn't serve a function.

Isn't that part of what it means to be vestigial? It used to serve a function, but it doesn't now.

Vestigial has often meant “we don’t know/haven’t identified what function this serves” … yet.

The famously "vestigial" human appendix actually serves as a seed vault for replenishing gut microbiota after a gut disaster, I hear.

Unfortunately. As with the appendix.

I'm pretty sure that on some days my toes can sense infrared. Spidey senses for the rest of us?

Do you mean non-heat infrared? It's probably not very controversial to say that all of our skin is quite good at detecting radiant heat.

In your philtrum. Close your eyes and hold your finger under your nose. Sensors activate.

Maybe not the same thing but holding a finger 1cm away from your face between your eyebrows creates a very strange sensation.

The only thing controversial is that I should not have made that post here on hn. Actually it's so clearly against the rules that even this is not controversial, sorry.

Skeptics like you are why we can’t have any superheroes like Parent :( (just kidding in case it was t obvious)

For about a year I could tell when my phone was about to ring in my pocket before the screen turned on. Something in the telemetry hardware stack whirring up made it feel a very very very near-imperceptibly tingly.

But then I changed phones and it doesn't happen anymore. Or, lower chance, there was a software update.

I believe it was the Pixel 3a.

Back in the flip phone days some people had little dongles hanging from their antennas that would light up seconds before the text chime went off. I guess it sensed the incoming transmission?

Must have listened to that little GSM handshake melody that used to be everywhere where speakers are connected to an active amp.

Disappointed, I was expecting a study about the virtual animals from Horizon Zero Dawn.

animal pictured is a harvestman I don’t know who calls these daddy longlegs but if you google pictures of daddy long legs, you don’t see no harvestman.

Harvestmen are called Daddy Longlegs in much of the continental US. I grew up calling them that (and didn't what kind of bug a Harvestman was before this thread).

It’s just a colloquial name that is applied to a number of organisms

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