Tuesday Obituary: Daddy Long-Legs

by Sahar Tavakoli

Spynner of fate: The Daddy Long-Legs that lived in my bathroom is dead. Date of birth unknown, it took up residence over-and-to-the-left of my showerhead some time mid-May. It was knocked down by broom and then washed down the drain on July 19, 2024.

Daddy Long-Legs, it would turn out, was only ever a nickname. On official documents, its name was Pholcus phalangioides. According to its Wikipedia page, the gammy, paternal sobriquet was one of many more, though none of the others would turn out to be quite as aptronymic. Also known as the Cellar Spider and Carpenter Spider, the P. phalangioides of this obituary lived above an acrylic shower/tub in a cellarless building. Also on the list are Gyrating Spider or the Vibrating Spider. If this P. phalangioides ever gyrated then it only ever did so when none were around to witness it.*

In my childhood home in Sydney, the appearance of a Daddy Long-Legs always felt like something of a good omen. Our local arachnids tend to be highly venomous, sometimes to the point of life-threatening. Others carry flesh-eating bacteria in their fangs. The rest are enormous and move like Mach 2 crabs. The Daddy Long-Legs, by contrast, is a spider that can be picked up in cupped hands, an un-creepy crawly that invites a supination and pronation of forearm as you then watch it tiptoe over and around your wrist. 

"Invisibility movement of Pholcus phalangioides captured in November [no need for the year I guess? –ed.] in Crozon, France. The movement of the spider can last much longer but the winter conditions do not lend itself to the multiplication of video recordings."

—Bernard de Go Mars, Wikimedia Commons.

These are the kin of that most blessed spider who, during hijra from Mecca to Medina, saved the life of Muhammad (peace be upon him) and Abu Bakr al Siddiq (Allah be pleased with him). As the story goes, the Prophet and his father-in-law, fleeing the Quraysh clan of which were once members and who now sought to kill them, took refuge in a cave in the mountain of Jabal Thawr. Under instruction from Allah (glorified and exalted) a fast-working P. phalangioides covered the cave’s opening with its fine web, giving the impression that none had ever entered.**

The spider in my shower was not weaving a web under divine instruction, nor would it ever be a daddy. What I’d mistaken for an oversized opisthosoma turned out to be an egg sac. Moments before I knocked the spider down with a broom, it had separated the sac from its posterior tagmata and seemed to be preparing to open it up. One P. phalangioides might be a blessing. Thousands is just kind of gross. The last name in Wikipedia’s list is the Angel Spider, and so the Daddy Long-Legs has become.

Daddy Long-Legs is survived by the Itsy Bitsy Spider, who seems to be impervious to death-by-drowning, and by the other P. phalangioides that lives in the crook between cornice and ceiling above my sofa.

* Zaddy Long-Legs, more like.

** My father was the first to ever tell me this story. Coincidentally, my father also goes by the name ‘Daddy,’ though, relative to height, his legs are kind of short.