One hot summer, I built a Mount and Brungs Proportional Diluter.

One hot summer, I built a Mount and Brungs Proportional Diluter.

A proportional diluter is a device that will deliver different concentrations of a solution to different outlets, all from one reservoir of the chemical and one reservoir of the diluent. It is usually used in aquatic toxicology research, which is why I built one. Today this task would be done simply with computer-controlled pumps. But way back then, these did not exist, or were wholly unaffordable if you were not Proctor & Gamble. Mount and Brungs devised a way to do it using just gravity and a crazy tangle of tanks, valves, tubing, funnels and self-starting siphons. They can be made to work semi-reliably, but require much tweaking and constant watching. Of course, my chemical of interest would give off toxic fumes, so to protect the other people in the lab, my MBPD had to be enclosed in its own custom-made (by me) sealed and ventilated cabinet.

It was a long, hot summer.

I built it in an old ramshackle garage in an isolated area of the Rutgers campus. On the bright side, I was still ensnared in my fractious and failing marriage to Valerie, so long, sweaty DEET-soaked hours all alone in the heat and humidity were balm for my soul.

But not entirely alone. I had some company. I had Harvestmen. Hundreds of Harvestmen.

You probably call them Daddy Long-Leg spiders. I did. They are not actually spiders, just distant cousins, although most people think that they are. I did.

I had not been in that garage long, on the first day of the build, when the first one dropped from the rafters onto my head. Now many people would be startled by this, even frightened. I was. But there was no getting around them. They were literally everywhere in that old garage. They dropped from above. They were on the walls. They crawled across the floor, across my work, across me, constantly. As it turns out, they are known for living in large groups.

I considered getting a couple of aerosol bug bombs, tossing them in and going away until the next day. But then I’d have to work among the fumes and pesticide residue. Also, I don’t like to kill anything without necessity. I grudgingly decided that I could live with the Harvestmen.

But, it wasn’t long before I grew to find them quite interesting. The ones in that central New Jersey garage were mostly brown, but some had this pretty purplish undertone to their carapaces. They had an amusing habit of stopping as they were walking down my arm or over my MBPD and bobbing in place for a few seconds, like characters in an old Fleischer Brothers cartoon. Much later I learned that this is done to confuse predators. Like me.

Many years later, an urban legend made the rounds that Harvestmen have the world’s deadliest venom, but their jaws are so weak that they cannot pierce human skin. This is false. Although they are indeed incapable of biting anything much larger than a gnat, they also have no venom glands at all. The little bobbing dance, and the ability to self-amputate a leg that will twitch as a decoy, are defensive tactics used to fool predators. Just ruses so they can survive.

I am still quite fond of Harvestmen. I empathize with them, stingless, venomless, harmless, just trying to bob and weave their way unscathed through the uncertain world.