The city’s long-legged beauties
On walls, both inside and outside of the city, the spiders’ friendly and very long-legged relatives, the harvestmen, crawl around in the autumn as if they have a very busy agenda. To be fair, this is also the case, as they never know if winter is just around the corner.
In many places, the harvestmen can be seen in the middle of the day when they are resting on northern facing walls, but at other times, they hide under the eaves or in cracks. In these cases, you have to wait until the evening, which is when the harvestmen come out from their hiding places to eat and socialize. These spiders pretty much eat anything and as they do not have neither poisonous hooks nor webs, they have to be thankful for whatever they can find, which they can handle with their longs legs.
It is always possible to distinguish the harvestmen from common spiders by the harvestmen’s single-jointed body (spiders have a distinct forepart and back part of the body).
There have been radical changes in the Danish harvestmen population in the last 30 years. The orange wall harvestman has arrived from the south and has forced out two original species, which previously were highly widespread and common: the multi-coloured long-legged harvestman and the spotted wall harvestman. And not only has the orange wall harvestman spread explosively, it has now been joined by the very characteristic Dicranopalpus ramosus, which is another type of harvestmen.
Only seven years after immigrating to Denmark, the Dicranopalpus ramosus is widespread in all of our cities. It has been spotted everywhere in Aarhus, Odense, Copenhagen, Vejle and Horsens. Yes even in Randers and Nørre Snede! So if you happen to see some suspicious people staring at a wall, it could be… well, let’s be honest, one of the very few harvestmen enthusiasts.