phalangioides.” Species Pholcus phalangioides – Longbodied Cellar Spider – BugGuide.Net and Rod Crawford told me in an email- “we are now being invaded by Holocnemus pluchei. Also, the eyes are much more closely grouped in P. phalangioides also gets bigger than the other two species, at least twice as large in some cases. opilionoides can be separated from the others by the dark marks on the lateral border of their carapace. manueli is more distinctly divided than the medial mark on P. The dark medial mark on the carapace of P. Similar species– There are 2 other, mostly eastern Pholcus one may find in the more arid parts of our region – “ Pholcus manueli has two dark, vertical stripes on the clypeus (the space between the bottom row of eyes and the beginning of the chelicerae), while P. Pholcus phalangioidesĭescription– Small (total body length 6-10mm) light yellow grey to translucent spider with very long, mostly translucent legs (up to 5 times the length of the body) carapace has an amorphous dark mark in the middle, extending to each side of the a thoracic groove abdomen (in spiders the call it the opisthosoma) with abundant short, fine hairs, mostly light grey with translucent areas along the margin the 8 eights are arranged in 2 tight groups of three, one group on each side of the cephalothorax, with 2 eyes slightly below and between the triads. It is unclear whether it actually frightens predators, or merely makes the spider so hard to see that the predator loses interest. I’ve never observed this in these spiders but I’ve seen other spiders do this and it’s rather amazing to watch. These spiders do share a defensive trait with many of the orb weavers, and that is that when they feel threatened they will whirl around the center of the web so fast that they become a blur. phalangioides population they are often crowded almost on top of each other. Pholcus phalangioidesĬompared to the intricate beauty of many orb weaver spider’s webs, those of Pholcus phalangioides are often messy affairs, and in areas with a large P. The accepted common name for Pholcus phalangioides is long-bodied cellar spider, and their family, Pholcidae, are called cellar spiders. They are often called ‘daddy longlegs’, but share that sobriquet with the harvestmen (arachnids that also sometimes have very long legs, but are in the order Opiliones and are not spiders, and can be recognized by the fact that their thorax and abdomen are a single unit). They are probably familiar to most people, having as they do a predilection for living in the upper corners of basements, cellars, and bathrooms. This is the Pholcus spider I talked about in the blog ‘In Search of Spiders’.

Long bodied cellar spider female