Daddy Longlegs Seem to Hunt Frogs in South America, Revealing the Gangly Arachnids as Overlooked Predators

Juan Carlos Narváez / Mashpi Lodge Lizardo Proaño was leading a group of travelers on an evening hike through the towering trees and lush foliage of Ecuador’s cloud forest in February 2020 when he spotted something that stopped him in his tracks: a daddy longlegs, also known as a harvestman, chowing down on a live frog of roughly similar body size. He called over his colleague, Juan Carlos Narváez, who snapped a few photos of the macabre scene.

Proaño works as a naturalist guide at Mashpi Lodge, an eco-hotel located within the 7,900-acre Mashpi-Tayra Reserve, so he’s intimately familiar with the diverse creatures that wander the forest’s misty hills. And though he had never seen a harvestman eating a frog before, he wasn’t necessarily surprised, given that harvestmen are omnivores known to consume just about anything they can get their gangly legs on. He’d previously seen the spindly arachnids eating worms, caterpillars and, once, the tail of a scorpion.

“I didn’t know this was something special,” Proaño tells Smithsonian magazine. “I thought it was normal because frogs are good prey for everybody. They don’t have any scales or hard bones. They are like gummy bears in the forest.”