Daddy Short Legs

A new species of daddy long legs has been found in Alaska. This one is thumb-tack sized, and has short legs. I've never seen the new type, but we were more than familiar with the regular long-legged kind when we lived in our trailer.

When it gets cold here the daddy long legs group together in huge billion-legged balls to try to keep warm. We had a bedroom floor in the trailer made of rotten particle board. We would be fast asleep in the middle of the night and one of the legs of our bed would suddenly fall through the floor, jolting us awake. This happened so many times that the floor looked like a cribbage board. We would have to keep our bed positioned JUST SO to keep the legs clear of any holes. The worst part was that we had millions of daddy long legs living under our trailer. All houses here have them underneath - that was a normal feature for houses here. But the holes in the floor were not. Daddy long legs would sometimes get through the underneath of the trailer and crawl out through the holes in the floor. Then they would crawl into our bed. I would go to brush a hair off my forehead and find that it was a spider. After a while I suspected that every tickle on my skin was a spider. I would jump up, flip on the light and throw back all the covers in search of daddy long legs. What I would have given if they could have just been daddy short legs! Just before we sold the trailer I found a spider on my stomach while I was in the shower. Even so, I never got used to them.

Click here to read the full story on the new species.