The annotated budak: Penes for your thought

The most commonly encountered harvestmen along local trails tend to be members of families with unreasonably slender legs and the ability to arouse unruly thoughts in hoppy little animals. Striding over bark and shrubbery with an irksome bouncy gait, the pill-bodied arachnids are live wires of distraction that attempt to hypnotise unwanted observers by bobbing up and down with frustrating energy.

Some families, however, defy the daddy-long-legged reputation of their order. Opilionids in the suborder Cyphophthalmi are stout-bodied animals that resemble armoured and overgrown mites. Similar in superficial build are the oncopodids (Greek for 'swollen legs') in the suborder Laniatores. Living on soil or deadwood under unsightly layers of leaf litter, these brownish harvestmen are usually encountered in random nocturnal surveys of the forest floor. This stout beast, which appears to match one identified by Murphy (plate 2.1) as Oncopus feae, has turned up more than once in recent attempts to corner more brilliant creatures.

Besides a set of shortish legs, oncopodids are distinguished by their bodies which lack spines and tubercles and a bridge that links the prosomal and opisthosomal segments. Arachnologists who specialise in these harvestmen also exhibit an unhealthy fascination for the male private parts, erecting phylogenetic trees that focus almost entirely on the highly diverse penis morphology of the family. The revered organ has a not unfamiliar design, having a long shaft or corpus and a rounded tip called the glans. Haemolymph pressure applied by aroused males causes stiffening, thus allowing insemination. (Laboratory workers, having no consensual means of fanning the passions of captive harvestmen, employ hot lactic acid to expand the organs of unfortunate males.) Turgid, the glans of oncopodids display a torrid assembly of styli and glandular modifications that make the penes resemble the heads of oriental dragons or the business end of baroque sandworms.

Elsewhere, other researchers have posited a redesignation of the family and the genus Oncopus, as the name had been earlier applied to a group of geometrid moths. Sandokan and Sandokanidae are the proposed replacements by authors enarmoured with pirate romances from the swashbuckling era of precolonial Borneo. It's a dubious honour for a buccaneer of fictional repute to have his name bestowed on a lowly hunter. For save perhaps a wench-winning toolbox, the two have little in common, with one defending himself with parries and thrusts while the other resorts to vile secretions from pale glands evident at the base of the fourth pair of awkward, knobbly legs.