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A daddy-longlegs possesses six eyes, including two vestigial pairs
- idunnoman1222 3y agoanimal 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.
- mikeyinternews 3y agoVestigial eyes not really "extra", but still cool.
- webdoodle 3y agoI 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.
- canadianfella 3y ago[dead]
- feverdream 3y agoIsn't that part of what it means to be vestigial? It used to serve a function, but it doesn't now.
- dwighttk 3y agoVestigial has often meant “we don’t know/haven’t identified what function this serves” … yet.
- hammock 3y agoUnfortunately. As with the appendix.
- Intralexical 3y agoThe famously "vestigial" human appendix actually serves as a seed vault for replenishing gut microbiota after a gut disaster, I hear.
- neonate 3y agohttps://archive.md/NxIiF https://archive.md/NxIiF
- strken 3y agoNote that even though Opiliones aren't spiders, Pholcidae - which are also commonly called daddy longlegs - definitely are. This article is about Opiliones.
- 13of40 3y agoThanks 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?
- dwringer 3y agoThough 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.
- bonton89 3y agoThis 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.
- krylon 3y agoI 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.
- bee_rider 3y ago
- usrusr 3y agoI'm pretty sure that on some days my toes can sense infrared. Spidey senses for the rest of us?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smallmancontrov 3y agoDo 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.
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoSkeptics like you are why we can’t have any superheroes like Parent :( (just kidding in case it was t obvious)
- Andrex 3y agoFor 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.
- aaronax 3y agoBack 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?
- usrusr 3y agoMust have listened to that little GSM handshake melody that used to be everywhere where speakers are connected to an active amp.
- robin_reala 3y agoHarvestman, for people to whom a daddy-longlegs is a crane fly (en-GB?).
- ubermonkey 3y ago"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.
- davidmurdoch 3y agoI live in Florida. I never knew about another other than the spider version of "Daddy long legs" until now.
- danielvaughn 3y agoYeah, 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.
- netcraft 3y agoIn 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.
- marcus0x62 3y ago
- integricho 3y agoDisappointed, I was expecting a study about the virtual animals from Horizon Zero Dawn.
- DonHopkins 3y agoDang! ... Who ate the middle out of the daddy longlegs? https://ifunny.co/picture/dang-who-ate-the-middle-out-of-the-daddy-longlegs-OeLw20CcA https://ifunny.co/picture/dang-who-ate-the-middle-out-of-the...
- rhplus 3y agoFascinating 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 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.
- high_priest 3y agoTesla 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.
- czzr 3y agoTesla did it to save costs. The world is not static, you can’t map it once and expect that to be enough.
- schainks 3y agoYeah, 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.
- valianteffort 3y agoYou 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.
- xipho 3y agoMore 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/ https://www.wcolite.com/.
- serf 3y agoI 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.
- geoelectric 3y agoIn 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.
- shikshake 3y agoSpiders seem so cool from a biological perspective, I wish I didn’t have a phobia of them :(
- animex 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 3y agoThere is more than one creature that is colloquially called "daddy longlegs", such as the crane fly.