Author: Anna Kusmer / Source: Atlas Obscura
Leading up to Halloween, as autumn set into the landscape of Southeastern Alaska, the administrative building at Glacier Bay National Park started sprouting creepy hair. The coarse brown globs would disappear by night and reform every morning, “like a roving mole,” says Ingrid Nixon, the park’s Chief Interpreter.
Upon closer inspection, it turns out that the globs were not hair at all: They were legs, thousands of them. The mole was in fact a massive, tightly-packed cluster of daddy longlegs.
Nixon says the timing was perfect, as it created a creepy mysterious sight in the lead up to Halloween. “I think everybody’s first reaction is eek, because it kind of just creeps you out,” she says. “Then it’s fascinating because in some of the cases, the little bodies are so tucked up, all you see is the legs and it really looks like hair.”
This behavior is common among daddy longlegs (also known as harvestmen), according to Prashant Sharma, an evolutionary biologist at University of Wisconsin, but there’s no straightforward explanation as to why they do it.
Sharma says one thing scientists do know is that the behavior happens more often in dry weather, such as the Alaska autumn, when humidity drops along with temperatures and the days get shorter. Daddy longlegs are prone to drying out, he says, so bunching together allows…
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