“Other arthropods have tarsomeres,” says Sharma, “but only harvestmen use them in such a broad range of behaviors - sensing, climbing, fighting, courtship.”
In the case of the species Phalangium opilio, the focus of a study Gainett and UW–Madison professor of integrative biology Prashant Sharma published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, their longest legs have 80 tarsomeres. They’re also divided, like fingers with many knuckles, into articulable sections called tarsomeres. Those longest legs, the second pair from the front, are covered in hair-like growths that work as sensory organs. The remaining pair, the longest, they wave and touch around like a blind man.”
“If you watch a daddy longlegs move, it will effectively walk on just three pairs of its legs. “The true spiders in the order Araneae, the group that most people are familiar with, they usually use all those legs for walking,” says Guilherme Gainett, a UW–Madison graduate student, lead author of a new study of the daddy longlegs genome, and a big fan of anything with eight limbs.
