Daddy long legs are actually good dads
nature video · Published on September 11, 2026
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Description
Paternal care varies widely across the animal kingdom, but in spiders, it’s vanishingly rare. Good thing this eight-legged familiar face isn’t a spider. A new study investigated the parental (and specifically, paternal) care habits of the harvestmen, an arachnid that looks a lot like a spider…but isn’t. The researchers were able to study the potential evolutionary relationships of these behaviors thanks to tens of thousands of photos gathered by everyday people who upload their flora and fauna finds to the app iNaturalist, which shares its users' uploads with scientists to be used for scientific research. With the improved size offered by this kind of data repository, scientists can ask all kinds of questions about animal behaviour, occurrence, migration, and more. - Written & Presented by Elliot Yates - Produced & Edited by Maren Hunsberger - Stock images: Getty Images / Kumpanat Phewphong / Natsicha / negoworks / Anders Widlund / Emma Sanger-Horwell / Philippe Gerber - Stock footage: Getty Images / enviromantic - Stock music: Adobe / Roman Spivak - Supervising Producer: Shamini Bundell From Machado, G. et al. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. (2026). One small step for citizens, one giant leap for science: iNaturalist records boost our understanding of the evolution of parental care in a clade of arachnids. https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlag061
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