Name: Edward Nickname: Scissor legs (we try to suppress the urge to call him Daddy, Leggy, or Leggy-Daddy) Species: Arachnid/Daddy long legs/cellar spider Home: corner of the ceiling in the living room Hobbies: chillest guy you will ever meet. Doesn’t do much but does this thing called leg threading which is sliding one leg at a time through the little pincers by his mouth to keep clean. In the mornings he can usually be spotted with a snack he previously hunted that night. In a couple of the pictures you can see Personality: Laid back, tolerant, docile, resilient, kind, chill as fricc. You think he’s dead then dang he’s walking. Gender: likely male
Facts About Daddy Longlegs: These arachnids can be found on every continent but Antarctica. Daddy long legs are arachnids, but they’re actually more closely related to scorpions than they are to spiders. They don’t produce silk, have just one pair of eyes, and have a fused body (unlike spiders, which have a narrow “waist” between their front and rear). That thing you heard at summer camp about daddy longlegs being the most poisonous creature in the world, but with fangs too weak to bite you? Not true. They don't even have fangs, and they can't make venom, either. According to scientists, the rumor might have gotten started during the retelling by an American tabloid of a study in Australia on the venom of a daddy longlegs there. As for what the daddy leg long eats, they don’t have fangs, they don’t have big strong pincers. Some of the little ones do seem to have muscular pincers, which allows them to grab and crush some little tiny, tiny bugs in the leaf litter. But except for a few families of them, most of them just don’t seem to be equipped to do much hunting. So researchers assume they just nibble on pieces of carcass, leftovers, and detritus. Not a very exciting diet. Scientists know from a very well preserved fossil of a daddy long-leg from Scotland, that they are at least 400 million years old. This fossil actually looks a lot like the long-legged species we see today. It is believed daddy longlegs split off from scorpions, which were becoming terrestrial about 435 million years ago. To put this in perspective, this is about 200 million years before dinosaurs appeared, which were only around for about 165 million years. So Edward is a very old species of arachnid. You would think that creatures with legs like these arachnids would have move around quite a bit, but that’s not the case. DNA sequencing populations of long-legged species near the coast of Brazil revealed that they do not get around at all. They don’t go anywhere. Their day is something like this: They’re in a crevice until about 7 o’clock, when they come walking out and they sit on a leaf all night long. And then when the sun starts to come up, they’ll walk back to the crevice. Those long legs are apparently all for male-male competition, or showing off to females, because they don’t really use them. As for why they don’t travel much, it’s some kind of fundamental trait they have about their need for humidity, their own behavior in terms of feeding and mating. Of course, after 40 million years, you’d expect someone to evolve the ability to just get up and get around. But I guess Edward isn’t much different from others of his breed in regards to his slothful lifestyle. But when it comes to defending themselves against predators, the daddy long leg is also equally lazy. Really, they either pretend to be dead for a few minutes (which isn’t that different looking than their normal presence), or they produce chemical excretions from glands on their bodies, which have been observed to repulse predators. Lucky for Edward, there is not much predators in the living room except maybe the ankle biters my mum babysits, so he might live out the full daddy long leg lifespan of 7 years! Warning: legs don’t grow back! be careful when handling these guys!
