Mountain Climbing Bug? From Andes..
Location: Andes Mountains
July 22, 2011 6:49 am
Dear Awesome BugMan,
Love the site! I’ve guided trips coast-to-coast, and have seen many cool bugs I couldn’t identify. Thanks!
This bug is from 14,500 feet up in the Andes Mountains, taken in early July.
It has oversized back legs like a grasshopper with large hooks. It is about a 2cm long.
Michael Brown, who runs the Outside Adventure film school, was leading a trip and found it.
Signature: Kaki Flynn

Harvestman in the Andean Snow

Dear Kaki,
We are finally ready to go live with your posting.  Thanks so much for indulging us offline, and first sending a larger resolution image that we requested, and then resending your original written request which got separated from the image.  Once we got the higher resolution image, we determined that based on the number of legs and other anatomical features, that this creature is a member of the order Opiliones, a group of Arachnids that are commonly called Harvestmen or Daddy Long Legs.  Last year, we received this image of an Opiliones from Chile that somewhat resembles your individual, but that species is found near the beaches, and your specimen is far from the ocean at a very high altitude.  We did a web search of Opiliones and snow and we found this Snow Creatures webpage that has a gallery of images of insects found in the snow, and it includes a single photo of an Opiliones on page 3, but it looks nothing like your individual.  Continued searching led us to a BioOne website of online journals including one entitled On the Occurrence of Epizoic Cyanobacteria and Liverworts on a Neotropical Harvestman (Arachnida: Opiliones)1. By scrolling to the end of the journal article, there are several images that you can enlarge of Opiliones from Brazil in the genus Neosadocus.  Structurally, they look even more like your individual.  While we have been unable to locate anything specific on Opiliones found at high altitudes in the Andes, we are confident that we have the order Opiliones correct.  For some interesting general information on Harvestmen, you can read the Opliones in the UK and Continental Europe web page.  There are so few insects and arachnids that are active in the snow, this was a very exciting posting for us to work on.  Again, thanks for indulging us and resending the information and images we requested.  We do have a final request.  Can you please provide the country where the sighting occurred.  We guessed at Peru, but we are not certain.

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Unknown Spider?
Location: Piedmont region of north carolina, suburban cary
June 18, 2011 12:08 pm
I found this digging up a boxwood bush in front of my house. The soil was a combination of soil with decaying leaves intermixed with areas of clay. The animal does not appear to have a distinct head but I do not have appropriate magnification.
Signature: Kimberlynn

Harvestman

Hi Kimberlynn,
Though it looks like a Spider, this is actually an arachnid from a different order, Opiliones, the group that contains Harvestmen, many of which are called Daddy Long Legs.  We believe we have identified your individual as Vonones ornata based on images posted to BugGuide.  As you observed, BugGuide notes that Opiliones are:  “Easily separated from spiders by the broad fusion of the two body segments, so that the body appears to be composed of a singular segment.”  Opiliones are not venomous.

Harvestman

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Identification
Location: Crete, Greece
February 4, 2011 6:42 am
I hope that you may be able to ID this ’creature’ for me. It is very much like a spider, but moves very slowly. When touched it ’plays dead’ and goes rigid for about 10 minutes, whereupon it will start to move again. It varies in size, anything from 1/4” long to 1” long. I found it in the bottom of my empty swimming pool (obviously fell in/was blown in) in Crete, Greece.
Carol
Signature: no problem

Cretan Creatures are Harvestmen

Hi Carol,
We opened your email just prior to leaving for a long long day at work yesterday, and we didn’t have the time to post.  We did not crop into your images because we wanted to protect the integrity of your post-production enhancements.  We are very puzzled by these creatures, and they seem to resemble Ticks.  We are hoping to get some professional assistance with your identification request.

Cretan Creatures in the order Opiliones

You can compare your creatures to photos of Ticks online, including the photos on this Texas Cooperative Extension website.

Cretan Creatures are Harvestmen

Hi, Daniel.
Many thanks for your quick response.  I looked at the Texas Co-operative Extension website, and would agree that they do rather resemble ticks, but I didn’t know that ticks were as large as these, some I have found with bodies as long as 1″.
I shall be most interested to hear further from you with hopefully a guranteed identification.
Many thanks for your help with this matter.
Carol

Entomologist Julian Donahue provides input
Hi Daniel,
They’re clearly arachnids. At first, I thought that they might be in the order Ricinulei (“tick spiders”) because of the hood-like structure at the anterior end, but the body shape and legs appear to be all wrong.
Although the mouthparts aren’t visible in the photo, my best guess is that they are unengorged ticks, based upon the body shape and the long legs.
Julian P. Donahue

Ed. Note: Thanks to a comment from Mirta in Patagonia, we now know that these unusual creatures are actually Harvestmen in the order Opiliones.  Here is a photo on Nature Photo and some images on the Natura Mediterraneo website as well.  Though we shy away from linking to Wikipedia, we did find this information there:  “The Trogulidae are a family of harvestmen with about 45 known species.  Members of this species have short legs and live in soil. They have dirt attached to their bodies, to escape predators. Their body length ranges from 2 to 22 mm. The body is in most genera somewhat flattened and leathery. Adults have a small hood, which hides their short chelicerae and pedipalps.“

Many thanks to everyone for their help in identifying these creatures, I really appreciate your trouble.  If I find anything else I can’t ID, which is highly likely, then I know where to come!
Carol

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