Oct 14, 2009: Rare Silk

Look at this beautiful, 11ft by 4ft, rare silk textile, on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.



It's not old, it's brand new, although it took a bunch of people 4 years to create.
It's rare because the silk came from these guys...



Each Golden Orb spider, in Madagascar, donated about 80ft of filament per 'milking' (my term), and it takes them a couple weeks to recover.

Peers came up with the idea of weaving spider silk after learning about the French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them.

“Simon managed to build a replica of this 24-spider-silking machine that was used at the turn of the century,” said Nicholas Godley, who co-led the project with Peers. As an experiment, the pair collected an initial batch of about 20 spiders. “When we stuck them in the machine and started turning it, lo and behold, this beautiful gold-colored silk started coming out,” Godley said.

The textile weighs 2.6 pounds, and it takes about 14,000 spiders to produce 1oz of thread, which means... [SIZE="1"]Oww, my head hurts[/SIZE].
But of course, some spiders were caught and 'milked' more than once, over the years.

Unlike silk worms, which are easy to raise in captivity, spiders have a habit of chomping off each other’s heads when housed together.
To get as much silk as they needed, Godley and Peers began hiring dozens of spider handlers to collect wild arachnids and carefully harness them to the silk-extraction machine. “We had to find people who were willing to work with spiders,” Godley said, “because they bite.”

Oh, and they only produce silk during the rainy season, October to June.
Hey :idea:, the season is just starting, anybody want a job?

link

As well as beautiful, it is three times stronger than kevlar, and can stretch by 40%. Imagine the outfit you could make from that stuff; the ultimate spiderman suit.

Different link (AMNH)

Careful! That's bug abuse.

Spider abuse! Oh, the humanity! Call PETA! Call Hollywood!

Really that's the best use we could come up with for spider silk? Well I guess we could start outfitting our soldiers and policemen in lovely blankets. :headshake

Picture NSFA

(not safe for arachnophobes)

I wonder if those Golden Orb spiders, produce gold thread in other parts of the world?

HELL.
NO.

Don't want to look at that, touch the finished product, go near the spiders, or hav anything further to do with this whole affair. Good day!

I SAID GOOD DAY!

(shudder)

BTW, silk worms are pretty ugly, too. But at least they don't bite. ack! or, make that, eek!

"...French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s."

Ah, the good old days, when missionaries worked for a living and invented neat stuff. That would be a good position to be in.

Slothboy;601094 wrote:

HELL.
NO.

Don't want to look at that, touch the finished product, go near the spiders, or hav anything further to do with this whole affair. Good day!

I SAID GOOD DAY!

I snorted out loud!

I agree with Slothboy. Squash all those yucky little cannibals.

I sneer disdainfully at you spider haters.

Okay, you have some irrational fear of them, fine, but that is your problem and is best dealt with by you avoiding spiders.

Spiders are perfectly okay in their own right, perform many useful functions for the rest of the world (keeping flies down, eg) and, IMHO can be very beautiful and fascinating.


[/rant]

Spiders are perfectly okay in their own right, perform many useful functions for the rest of the world (keeping flies down, eg) and, IMHO can be very beautiful and fascinating.

Yeah, but not in my house - because I squish the nasty bastards.

jinx;601173 wrote:

Yeah, but not in my house - because I squish the nasty bastards.

I have a treaty (that they don't always honor). If they stay out of the house and away from me, I don't squish 'em. If they wander into my territory, I unleash the deadly stomp on 'em.

And then I waterboard 'em for good measure.

dar512;601180 wrote:

If they wander into my territory, I unleash the deadly stomp on 'em.

Ah. So that explains the buzzing hordes of disease-carrying mosquitoes and flies that hang out at dar512's place. The poor kid never quite grasped this whole "food chain" concept.

newtimer;601188 wrote:

Ah. So that explains the buzzing hordes of disease-carrying mosquitoes and flies that hang out at dar512's place. The poor kid never quite grasped this whole "food chain" concept.

They get the same deal as the spiders. If they can't stay outside, their life is forfeit. I am deadly with a magazine.

So you've got spiders eating flies for you, huh? How's that working out for you? Don't the webs get in the way?

spudcon;601058 wrote:

Spider abuse! Oh, the humanity! Call PETA! Call Hollywood!

Beat me to it. :lol:

You wanna get rid of flying insects? Keep snakes and toads around the house. They don't leave filthy webs around, and can eat more bugs in one night than a whole army of spiders. (Especially if I'm squishing the spiders.)

does that guy have a huge right finger or what? that was pretty much the first thing I saw when the page loaded. And these guys make awesome golden webs in costa rica....catching hummingbirds and huge grasshoppers!

Wow, that's really pretty. And that yellow color is natural?

That's what she said.

I would have volunteered for that work. I love spiders. I had one I named Boris (obviously!) spinning the most fantastic webs on my office window last month. Huge, lovely symmetric webs, about 20" across.

I usually try and save spiders, if they're in my house...

HOWEVER, if they reject my hand of friendship, and back away from me?

Well... Let's just say that I deal with rejection... badly.

SPLAT! POW! BAM! WHY DON'T YOU LOVE ME?! BAM! POW! SPLAT!

very clever:sniff: i think im going to cry

I leave the basement spiders alone. There's one or two down there big enough to take me.
But the ones upstairs in the bathtub? Sorry, down the drain you go! I just take my glasses off and pretend I didn't see them.

I would love to touch that cloth (NO jokes pur-lease!)
I bet it feels gorgeous.

I'm not fussed by spiders.
I think because my Mum and sister were, and I was always trying to emulate my Dad rather than them. In fact now Dad's in his 70th year I'm pretty much fulfilling manly duties such as opening jars (I have a strong grip boys) and evacuating insects.

Yes, I evacuate them. Whereas Dad, too old for the chase, squashes, smacks or (HORROR!) sprays them to death. Poor spiders. I don't care much about the woodlice though.

queenb;601519 wrote:

I leave the basement spiders alone. There's one or two down there big enough to take me.
But the ones upstairs in the bathtub? Sorry, down the drain you go! I just take my glasses off and pretend I didn't see them.

Warning: they can crawl back up out of drains.:eek:

They're pretty good at water spouts too. Even if they're itsy bitsy.

There's this spider that likes to hang out next to my keyboard, and mouse. We had to have a little talk. I think he was listening because there's no sign of him/it anymore....

Slothboy;601094 wrote:

HELL.
NO.

Don't want to look at that, touch the finished product, go near the spiders, or hav anything further to do with this whole affair. Good day!

I SAID GOOD DAY!

Ditto.

capnhowdy;601730 wrote:

They're pretty good at water spouts too. Even if they're itsy bitsy.

:lol2:

newtimer;601141 wrote:

"...French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s."

Ah, the good old days, when missionaries worked for a living and invented neat stuff. That would be a good position to be in.

Yeah, the missionary position is not bad, I suppose...

Cicero;601889 wrote:

There's this spider that likes to hang out next to my keyboard, and mouse. We had to have a little talk. I think he was listening because there's no sign of him/it anymore....

:greenface:greenface:greenface:greenface:greenface:greenface:greenface

As long as they are not visible in my bedroom, I leave them to do their own thing. Anywhere else in the house (unless Mum's visiting), I don't mind them being there.

We have a subspecies of golden orb spiders down here, or at least I think they are, that weave a three foot web across the front of my place.

It is truly amazing what one can do with spider silk, and we are working on synthetic spider silk.

They've been working on synthetic spider silk, for a very long time, and last I read, not making much progress. It's devilishly complicated, and spiders produce something like 6 or 8 different types of silk, for different applications.

Oh, and the spider turning the liquid into thread is a mechanical, not chemical, process.