From the brains behind brains on, this is The Moment of Um.

Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Ruby Guthrie.

If you've ever been in a basement, garage, cellar, or crawl space before, it's likely that

you've come face to face with a daddy

long legs. You know, the creature with super duper long legs and a ton of nicknames like cellar spider,

carpenter spider, daddy long leaguer, vibrating spider, gyrating spider, long daddy, and skull spider.

Have you ever wondered why their legs are so long?

Uma has.

Hi, my name is Uma from Chicago, Illinois.

My question is, why do daddy long legs have super long legs?

That's also a question that I'm very interested on,

and it's the first question I thought about when I first saw Daddy Long Legs.

My name is Guy, and I am a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and I study

Daddy Long Legs and their legs.

So we think that Daddy Long Legs have long legs for a couple of reasons.

One of the main reasons is that it really gives them a leg up into moving better and faster in the

forest because the legs are giant. So imagine each step you go much harder. Besides being so long, the tips of their legs are

also able to coil around tweaks and branches, just like a monkey's tail. And on top of that,

the legs are also very important for them to sense the world. So, and the tips of their legs, they can taste and they can smell and they can sense temperature.

So it's just like as if they had hundreds of small noses and tongues at the tips of those legs.

One of their super bars as well is that the legs, when a predator tries to bite one leg, they

can voluntarily drop this leg and the leg will keep moving while the daddy long legs

...