Note that even though Opiliones aren't spiders, Pholcidae - which are also commonly called daddy longlegs - definitely are. This article is about Opiliones.
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.
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.
I don’t want to hear any evidence that it’s not completely factual. In my worldview it’s real.
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.
I kill mosquitoes but not the crane flies. Or silverfish which I have in my place a lot. They're harmless.
Maybe they eat dust as well though and my house is pretty dusty so there's that :)
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.
Added AbstractDaddyLongLegsConfigStrategy, to help with implementing concrete config strategies for DaddyLongLegs.
https://www.historyhit.com/the-extraordinary-daddy-long-legs...
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.
These spiders have decided to live life with PvP mode on, very cool.
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.
So, do they taste like mint too? ;)
I've never been brave enough to chew one up, though.
I've never really encountered that common name applied to harvestmen, so presumably that's a regional thing from some other region.