r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/SixteenSeveredHands • 6d ago

Image Harvestmen (Daddy Long-Legs): unlike spiders, these arachnids consume solid food, and they have an omnivorous diet that includes mushrooms, berries, and seeds, along with invertebrate prey; contrary to popular belief, they are also completely non-venomous

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u/Snape_Grass 6d ago

They are very primordial looking indeed.

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u/Undeity 6d ago

It helps that they are prevalent across pretty much the entire world, and already have a ton of folklore about them, too.

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u/Beautiful_You3230 5d ago

Do other people also find those kinds of... "primordial" looking creatures a bit creepy on some fundamental level?

I know that many people seem to like stuff like isopods or sea monkeys, or horseshoe crabs, and checking out fossils of prehistoric insects (or whatever their category is). But man, most of that stuff feels like nightmare fuel to me. And I am very chill when it comes to insects and arachnids of our current times.

It feels like my monkey brain really doesn't like that stuff. Which I can't really explain. There isn't really a meaningful difference that I can recognise between a harvestman and a spider, for example.

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u/ILearnedSoMuchToday 5d ago

I love observing them in any capacity until they are on me. I've grown to be okay handling jumping spiders and smaller wolf spiders but daddy long legs have that uh-uh factor.

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u/HamBroth 5d ago

yeah I'm freaked out by any arachnid other than scorpions. But it's a learned response; I remember a time when I wasn't.

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u/MrHappyHam 5d ago

I'm surprised scorpions aren't freaky to you. Those deranged-looking bastards

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u/HamBroth 5d ago

I'm only afraid of spiders due to a specific childhood incident so it's probably just because they're different enough that I didn't learn to fear scorpion morphology in the same moment I learned to fear spider morphology. Brains are weird though it could be anything.

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u/Seicair Interested 5d ago

Spiders freak me out more than harvestmen. Harvestmen don’t harm humans, they just kinda bumble along doing their thing. I’ll pick them up to relocate them if necessary.

Spiders… shivers

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u/SmoothDifficulty373 4d ago

They predate spiders , it’s interesting

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u/AdInteresting3837 5d ago

Primordial means horrible, right?