War of the Worlds

Harvestmen are animals that could have stepped straight out of a science fiction story. That globular body, slung between unfeasibly long angular legs, could easily be a Martian fighting machine, striding through hordes of fleeing, terrorised refugees in War of the Worlds....... or maybe I’ve got an overactive imagination..... but check out the CD cover for Jeff Wayne’s musical version of War of the Worlds (see http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/bestselling-music-2007/3826-1.jpg) and I think you’ll see what I mean.

You do need a pretty vivid imagination to come close to understanding how these strange animals perceive their surroundings. Those two eyes, on either side of the turret on top of their body, are not particularly effective and they mostly explore their surroundings using their senses of taste and smell, which are located on their palps, on either side of their mouth (just visible behind the front leg in the picture above - double-click on the image for a larger view)), and on their second pair of legs. Notice how, in the pictures above and below, this harvestman is lifting and extending one of its second pair of legs towards the camera – it’s smelling me. They take great care of that vital second pair of legs and if you watch one of these animals for long enough you’ll notice that it will draw each of this pair of legs through its jaws quite frequently, to keep these sensory limbs clean and in tip-top condition.

There are scores of these intriguing animals in our garden at the moment, striding through the dry grass and dead leaves in that cautious, fastidious way in which they move, searching for small insects to feed on amongst the decaying vegetation of autumn.