In my animal misconceptions video, I casually mentioned that daddy long legs aren't spiders and received a ton of comments asking for clarification or suggesting that it's not that simple, so I feel the need to clear things up a little bit. But first, a disclaimer. If images of spiders make you uncomfortable, one, you shouldn't have clicked this video, and two, you should stop watching right about now. Cutest spider ever, right? When editing the video, I decided to cut out a Daddy Long Legs discussion and now you'll see why.

To answer the question, I decided to cut out a daddy long legs discussion and now you'll see why. To answer the question are daddy long legs spiders, we first need to know what are spiders, and for that we need the biological classification system you should have learned in high school. Spiders are in the animal kingdom, which is a pretty broad class of life and not helpful in narrowing things down. The phylum that concerns us are the arthropods, which are a subset of animals with external skeletons, segmented bodies, and jointed limbs. The arthropods with exactly eight legs and two body segments are in a class called arachnids, the name where arachnophobia comes from. And while often used to mean fear of spiders, there are plenty of arachnids that are not spiders, such as scorpions and mites. The true spiders are a subset of arachnids in the order of araniate. What defines these as spiders are their fangs,

the poison glands within them, their numerous eyes, and their spinnerets that allow them to make webs. Now that we have a spider checklist onto the second problem, the named Daddy Longlegs means different things in different places. In Australia, this seller spider is called a Daddy Longlegs, which, as an eight-legged multi-eyed web spinning member of a Raineye makes it an official spider. It also produces venom, but then so does everything in that bloody country. Where I grew up, this is a daddy long legs, sometimes called a harvestman. They have just two soulless eyes, can't web-sling, and lack fangs and poison glands, and so fail the spider checklist and are in a different order called Apilionis. It was these that I had in mind while making the video. To make things more complicated in my adoptive UK, the British call this cranefly daddy long legs. Unlike the closely related opiolionis and a rainy E, the crane fly isn't an arachnid but an insect, the class of arthropods with six legs and three body segments. And as if the name wasn't ambiguous enough at this point, there is also a plant called daddy long legs.

For taxonomical completeness, the plant is over here in a different kingdom. But because of the way life works, even this plant is distantly related to those other daddy long legs because plants and animals are both eukaryotes, which means that their cells have complex structures, most notably a nucleus. So to fully answer the first question, there are four daddy long legs, three animals, two

arachnids but only one spider among them. So to fully answer the first question, there are four daddy long legs, three animals,

two arachnids, but only one spider among them.