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Project Noah Nature School
Order Opiliones
Body length: ~0.3mm
Legs length: ~3.5cm
Season : Winter season
Time : 01:50am 15Feb2022
Frequency : Rare
Life stage : Adult
Spotted inside the car parking very close to open abandoned area with lot of plants.
It has only 6 legs. Not sure it's really a spider or spider-mimicking-insect. Body and jaws exactly match to that of a spider.
Spotted on Feb 15, 2022
Submitted on Jun 12, 2022
5 Comments
Tried to google and got plenty of information. It's good example for Autotomy. Ref : https://youtu.be/tjDmH8zhp6o
One more good research article : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article...
Zlatan Celebic,
I have uploaded one more spotting of same species at
https://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/28.... It has lost 2 right legs and orbital sockets are clearly visible. So, this proves your point.
Looks like loosing legs is common phenomenon in this species! :) They may be growing back like gecko's tail but not sure.
BTW, I wonder why they have sockets to hold legs. Usually, some insects (ex: long-horn beetle) have sockets to hold the antenna, the reason may be to provide more angle of rotation or some other reason.
Thank you SukanyaDatta & Zlatan Celebic! :) Added scientific name at Order level. If you have any name at lower taxonomic rank, please let me know.
I was going to propose the same as Sukanya... moreover, I had impression that this one lost two legs - there seems to be two "sockets" or empty spaces for second pair of legs.
Looks like a harvestmen. I am sorry I do not know the exact species.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opiliones