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