Long body cellar spider overview skin#
Long body cellar spider overview full#

And an individual may reportedly live as long as three years altogether if not eaten by something, or mashed by a misguided human.Ī female, which is larger than a male and equipped with a larger abdomen, typically lays a few dozen eggs at a time, wrapping them loosely in silk and then holding the package in her jaws while resting in her web.

Long body cellar spider overview full#

Depending on their environment and food supply, it may take months or even a full year for one to reach maturity, passing through, typically, a half-dozen molts as it grows. Perhaps the most surprising trait of the cellar spider is its longevity.

But in an artificially heated environment, cellar spiders are active year-round, and are probably the easiest arthropod for a Vineyard-based bug enthusiast to find in midwinter. So the cellar spider truly does live up to its name, being rarely found outside human structures.

Even under natural conditions, Pholcus prefers to live in cavelike settings. While the origin of this species apparently lies in the Mediterranean region, cellar spiders have been transported widely if accidentally during the course of human commerce and migrations, and now occur quite widely around the world. You can demonstrate this for yourself by giving a good poke to an occupied cellar spider web most of the time, the spider is instantly swinging. When one is disturbed in its web, the spider shakes the strands of the web, setting the whole shebang into motion and turning the spider itself into a bobbing target for any would-be predator.

The actual defensive strategy of a cellar spider is less dramatic but more interesting. As is true of all spiders, actually biting something the size of a human is an absolute last resort for a cellar spider: You’d need to try quite hard to get one of these things to put its fangs into you. On the rare occasions when they do bite humans, the effects are said be a trivial and short-lived sting.

Long body cellar spider overview skin#

And the fangs of this spider, at least on large individuals, actually are long enough and strong enough to pierce human skin (not that these spiders have any interest in doing so).īut the weak venom renders this species harmless. Fake news! The venom turns out to be not especially potent even to the arthropods that are a cellar spider’s usual prey. The worst slander perpetrated against Pholcus phalangioides is that these spiders are highly venomous, and that only the shortness of their fangs prevent them from being dangerous to humans. But the body segments on a harvestman are merged into a single, nearly round object, while a true cellar spider has a more elongated body with a distinct division between the abdomen and the forward sections. “Daddy longlegs” is also a name applied to the Opiliones, a superficially similar group that is only distantly related to the cellar spider.Īlso called harvestmen, Opiliones share the delicate legs of Pholcus. Pholcus is sometimes referred to with the common name “daddy longlegs,” which highlights why serious students of spiders avoid common names altogether in favor of more precise, if sometimes awkward, scientific names.

The cellar spider’s habits don’t help much: As their common name suggests, they’re animals of dark, damp places, building their untidy webs in corners or between rafters in cellars, attics, or closets. Many people are misguided enough to find spiders of any sort to be repulsive, and the exaggerated anatomy of a cellar spider seems to make this species especially reviled. But the salient trait of this species is a set of outrageously long, thin legs: On a large female, the span of those threadlike limbs may approach three inches. With a body length ranging up to nearly half an inch, they’re good-size spiders to start with. These things are, let’s admit, a bit creepy both in appearance and in habits.