Harvestmen with missing leg.

[Trent Watts]

Daddy-long legs , as we called them when I was young, are in the Harvestmen family and are not spiders but are arachnids. They have 8 legs but only one pair of eyes, do not produce silk and do not have venom glands and their body is not segmented as in spiders.
This one was sitting on top of a Brown-eyed Susan flower and I noticed that it only had 3 legs on one side of its body. With my aging eyes I was unable to detect which leg was missing so I took some images to enlarge on the computer. You can see that the second leg has broken off close to the body. Apparently if a leg is broken off it can twitch for up to an hour, supposedly to distract a predator, and does not grow back.

 

[AlanLichty]

The closeup does make it clear which legs is missing. They have certainly been successful at sticking around - I have lived in a wide variety of environments through the years and have seen them thriving in all of them.

 

[Jim Sanderson]

Not the most handsome bug in the forest, but you captured it nicely.

 

[JimFox]

wow! That's some long legs!