Harvestmen Eating Blueberry Muffins

I went camping a few weeks ago with some friends from high school. (We were at Burke Lake in Fairfax County, so it wasn’t exactly the deep wilderness.)  When night fell, our campsite was swarmed by harvestmen.  The next morning, we found dozens of them crawling over our tents.  But what was even odder was that during the night harvestmen were crawling over the picnic table, apparently looking to eat our leftovers.  

(I should note here that harvestmen are arachnids of the order Opiliones.  They differ from spiders in lacking a constriction between the two body segments, and having one pair of eyes rather than three or four  pairs.  An alternate, and probably more common, name is “daddy longlegs”.  I am using “harvestmen” here, because it is simpler, and because I am unsure of the plural form for “daddy longlegs”.  Is it just “daddy longlegs”, or “daddy longlegses”, or is it “daddies longlegs”, in the tradition of “courts-martial” and the Latin “patresfamilias”?) 

The harvestmen seemed particularly to like the blueberry muffins.  

Here are some pictures.

Harvestmen are known to be omnivores and scavengers, which would leave them well-suited to consume human-produced foodstuffs.  My casual internet searching provided two mentions of harvestmen eating human food, here (“One in a terrarium will survive on tidbits of bread, butter and fatty meat as well.”) and here (“A harvestman will eat little ants on a crumb of bread and then eat part of the crumb.“).  I have to wonder if the reason that harvestmen were common at the campsite was that they had become accustomed to scavenging the remains of campers’ meals.