The long-bodied cellar spider is the wispy, long-legged spider often found hanging upside down in basement corners, and people have carried it to buildings around the world. Bites are rare, and it is not considered dangerous to people. Many people call it daddy longlegs.
Appearance
- Appearance
- Females have a body about 5/16 in (8 mm) long, with legs five to six times that length. The body is pale gray, tan, or whitish, and it has eight eyes.
Look-alikes
HarvestmenOpiliones
Harvestmen have a single oval body with no waist and never spin webs. A cellar spider has a separate head and abdomen and lives in a web.
Why they get mixed upBoth are small-bodied with very long, thin legs, and both get called daddy longlegs.
Where it lives
- Typical habitats
- basements
- cellars
- garages
- attics
- Range
- Spread by people to buildings in most temperate countries, including US homes.
- Preferred conditions
- Prefers warm, dim, quiet, and often damp spots near ceilings. Outdoors it lives in caves and rock crevices.
Behavior
- Diet
- Insects and other spiders. It often leaves its own web to invade other spiders' webs and hunt the owner, and it may turn on its own kind when food is scarce.
- Activity
- It hangs upside down in a loose, messy, nonsticky web and keeps adding to it rather than replacing it, so webs pile up in corners. When disturbed, it whirls or bounces rapidly in the web until it looks like a blur.
Life cycle
- Nest
- The female carries her loosely bound cluster of eggs in her jaws instead of attaching it to the web.
- Time to maturity
- About a year from egg to adult.
- Lifespan
- Adults may live two more years.
Cautions
- Cautions
- Bites are rarely reported. The venom of cellar spiders is thought to have little effect on people, at most a mild sting.
Conservation
- IUCN Red List
- NENot EvaluatedNot yet assessed
Culture and stories
- Culture and stories
- Lab tests found its silk can slow the growth of several kinds of bacteria. In one experiment, researchers shaped its silk into a tiny lens that may help with imaging living tissue.
More species to explore
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