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.
So . . . they made a spider butt-milker? Ugh.
ReplyDeleteSo is the tapestry sticky?
ReplyDeleteHahah 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.
ReplyDeleteThose 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.
good morning, nice post,,,
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