Jan 10, 2010

Spider Tapestry

Here's another spidery tale from Judy...

What do you do if you have four years to kill and 1,063,000 golden orb spiders (Nephila madagascariensis) at hand? Well, if you're Peers and Godley, you enlist some help and weave an 11-by-4 foot tapestry.





















I highly recommend reading the article to get all the details, but suffice it to say that these two gents spent quite some time hunting down apocryphal tales of articles woven from spider silk. They then duplicated the feat. It involved developing a machine to which 24 spiders at a time could be hooked up and milked of their silk. After about 10 minutes of being hooked up, and about 80 feet of silk later, the spiders were safely returned to their boxes. And just in case you're wondering: that saffron color is the natural hue of the spider silk.

4 comments:

KittyChymira said...

So . . . they made a spider butt-milker? Ugh.

Anonymous said...

So is the tapestry sticky?

BugLady said...

Hahah that's freaking awesome. I've read about Nephila spiders having really strong webs, stronger than steel, and were being thought of for several commercial applications. Making tapestry with it is just too cool, though. I want one.

Those are pretty fat looking spiders. Look how they're just chilling on the man's hands. I love Nephila spiders.
Ours are N. clavipes, they're way skinny.

edi swarno said...

good morning, nice post,,,