Common Harvestman

• When a predator catches it by a leg it sheds the leg deliberately and the leg goes on twitching by itself for minutes, distracting the attacker; the harvestman never regrows it.
• Unlike spiders, it has no venom glands and no spinnerets, and the belief that it is the most venomous spider in the world is entirely false.
• It is one of the few arachnids able to eat solid particles of food rather than liquefying them and sucking them up.
• Its legs are extraordinarily long for its body size: the longest is around 5.8 cm on an animal half a centimetre across.
• Like the rest of the harvestmen, it has no fangs and no venom or silk glands; it defends itself with scent glands and by shedding a leg if caught by one.
• Shed legs do not grow back, so it is a one-use defence per leg.
• The sexes are easy to tell apart: the male has a reddish-brown body and the female is paler, with a dark rectangular patch in the middle of her back.
• Some species in the genus are gregarious and form dense aggregations.

Habitat & environment

Walls, trunks, hedgerows and damp understorey of Europe

Sources consulted: Latreille (1798); Hillyard, Harvestmen (Synopses of the British Fauna); ARKive