Old Wives' Tale Busted

Daddy Long Legs Are the World's Most Venomous Spiders, but Their Fangs Can't Bite You

"The claim that daddy long legs have the deadliest venom of any spider, but are harmless to humans because their fangs are too small or weak to pierce skin."

This one is wrong on several levels at once. "Daddy long legs" is actually a common name loosely applied to at least three completely different creatures: harvestmen, which aren't even true spiders and have no fangs or venom glands at all; crane flies, which are insects, and many species can't bite anything because they have no mouthparts; and cellar spiders, the one actual spider among the three. Even for cellar spiders, the specific creature the myth most often means, their venom is far less potent than a black widow's, not more, and while their fangs are genuinely small, a 2019 study confirmed they can and occasionally do bite people, producing nothing worse than a mild, brief sting.

Myth vs. FactThe myth is confused about which animal it's even describing, wrong about the venom being unusually dangerous, and wrong that the fangs can't physically bite at all. All three parts of the claim fall apart independently.
Sources: Species identification and venom-potency research documented via the Burke Museum, UC Riverside Department of Entomology, and a 2019 Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution study.

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