The harvestman moves through the woods on eight spindly legs supported by delicate tentpoles and a plump body that has two small eyes. These arachnids are sometimes called daddy-longlegs. Their outdoor lifestyle is different from other spiders called daddy-longlegs. There are other interesting differences. The harvestman's elegant limbs have flexible tips that allow them to wrap around a branch like a monkey's tail.Geneticists are intrigued by how arachnids developed. Harvestmen are far from spiders than other species. Researchers who sequenced the genome of the harvestman reported Wednesday that arachnids are different from spiders in several key ways. They also described how certain genes control the growth of their trademark legs in a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.The first concern of the team was the size of the harvestman's genome. The duplication of entire genomes has occurred in the past, giving spider ancestors more genetic material to use for evolution. This may have led to greater diversity among spiders.Vanessa Gonzlez, a Smithsonian Institution computational genomics scientist, is the author of the paper. She believes that duplicated genomes can give rise to new functions.
