On many mornings I share my shower with a long-legged friend. In fact my friend has eight very long legs and the same number of eyes. She usually hangs upside-down in a loose web above the shower head, and she is popularly known as a “cellar spider” or a “daddy-long-legs.” The latter name is confusing, perhaps, since she is not a dad, and, furthermore, she is not one of those gangly amblers we have all seen in the garden, who are also known as daddy-long-legs. The garden “daddies” are the ones with the tiny, brown M&M-like bodies and hair-like legs. Same name but different creatures. Both occasionally live under suspicion.
Outdoors, late into autumn, and as long as I can still hear field crickets, I can find the garden-variety daddy-long-legs roaming in the bee balm. These harmless creatures, more accurately called “harvestmen,” are in the family Phalangiidae. Harvestmen are not spiders at all, but cousins of spiders. They are kin to mites and pseudoscorpions. Harvestmen have one body part comprising head, thorax and abdomen. Spiders, of course, have two body parts, and insects three.
Rumors persist that the garden’s daddy-long-legs are poisonous and that their bite could harm people if only their fangs were longer. Not true: Harvestmen are nonpoisonous. They have no venom; and, in fact, they have no fangs. Harvestmen do not spin silk or weave webs to snare prey. They slowly pick their way among the leaves of the garden in search of a lunch of decomposing insects or snails.
But what about the indoor daddy-long-legs, the cellar spiders (Pholcidae), the type of spider that hangs out in my shower? In the bathroom and other rooms of my home, I can find cellar spiders waiting by their snares in various corners. Could these house-dwelling ‘daddies’ be any threat to humans?
Certainly, the cellar spiders are real spiders. They have two body parts, a cephalothorax and an abdomen. They spin silk and are fully equipped with fangs and venom. But can they hurt people? It turns out they can’t. The fangs of cellar spiders are too short—only about .25 millimeters long, about the length of the diameter of the period that ends this sentence. Human skin is thicker than that, so no danger.
Entomologist Rick Vetter at the University of California, Riverside, noted recently that there is not a single documented case of a cellar spider biting a human and causing physical injury. Adam Savage, the host of “Myth Busters,” a popular television program, once decided to test the spider’s bite before thousands of interested viewers. The result? A slight burning sensation.
To examine this risk myself, I sought the biggest cellar spider I could find. As I approached within inches, she began to strenuously pump her web like a pulsating drum skin. I wondered if this behavior was meant to threaten an approaching predator with entanglement. I cupped her in my hand, and she frantically sought escape; yet despite her movement, I could barely feel her touch. I was concerned she might injure herself. Indeed, just the previous day, outside my front door, I had found a harvestman with only five remaining legs! I pressed her head against the thin skin on the back of my fingers, but she would not bite. I returned her to the vicinity of her web, where she resumed an air of nonchalance.
Cellar spiders, the home-bound daddy-long-legs, apparently are more interested in eating insects and other spiders than in biting human shower mates. As such, the large individuals, like the one I traumatized, are free to roam in my house, slowly reducing the number of any other spiders. I have no issue with this spider. And on the occasions she has become weighted with mist, and has slid down the wall and fallen with the torrent into the tub, I have come to her rescue. Rinsed, but otherwise unharmed, my little friend is returned to her quarters by the showerhead.
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