A
rare textile made from the silk of more than a million wild spiders goes on
display in 2009 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
To produce
this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb
spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers
carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids.
The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made
from natural spider silk existing in the world today.
“Spider
silk is very elastic, and it has a tensile strength that is incredibly strong
compared to steel or Kevlar,” said textile expert Simon Peers, who co-led the
project. “There’s scientific research going on all over the world right now
trying to replicate the tensile properties of spider silk and apply it to all
sorts of areas in medicine and industry, but no one up until now has succeeded
in replicating 100 percent of the properties of natural spider silk.”
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.
Father
Comboué, who one historical text erroneously calls Father Comboné, had a
partner in designing his machine, M. Nogué. Together, they got quite a spider
silk fabric industry going in Madagascar and even exhibited “a complete set of bed hangings” at the Paris Exposition of
1898. That fabric has since been lost, but the exhibition brought them some
attention, excerpted below.
“It
should be said that the female halabe allows herself to be relieved of her
silken store with exemplary docility and this in spite of the fact that she is
distinguished for her ferocity; her usual treatment of the males who pay her
court is to eat them and she feasts without compunction on members of her own
sex weaker than herself. M Nogue’s apparatus consists of a sort of stocks
arranged to pin down on their backs a dozen spiders. The spiders accept this
imprisonment with resignation and lie perfectly quiet while the silken thread
issuing from their bodies is rapidly wound on to a reel by means of a cleverly
devised machine worked by hand.” — Great Britain Board of Trade Journal
“The
first experiments of Father Comboné were made in the simplest manner. The
spiders were imprisoned in match boxes and by slightly compressing the abdomen
he managed to extract and wind upon a little reel turned by hand it thread that
sometimes attained a length of 500 yards… it is to the ingenuity of M. Nogue,
one of the sub directors, that we owe the apparatus which permits the thread to
be wound mechanically and to be twisted and doubled in the quickest and most practical
manner. This is done by means of a curious little machine, not easy to
describe, in which the spiders are imprisoned by the throat while undergoing
the operation. Young Malagasy girls go daily to a park near the school to
gather three or four hundred spiders which they carry in osier baskets with
wooden covers to be divested of their webs… Generally after having submitted to
the reeling operation the spiders are put back in the park for a couple of
weeks… [The silk’s] color when first spun is a beautiful gold and it requires
no carding or preparation of any sort before being woven. Will this be the silk
of the future?” — The Literary Digest
But
to make a textile of any significant size, the silk experts had to drastically
scale up their project. “Fourteen thousand spiders yields about an ounce of
silk,” Godley said, “and the textile weighs about 2.6 pounds. The numbers are
crazy.”
Researchers
have long been intrigued by the unique properties of spider silk, which is
stronger than steel or Kevlar but far more flexible, stretching up to 40
percent of its normal length without breaking. Unfortunately, spider silk is
extremely hard to mass produce: 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.”
By
the end of the project, Godley and Peers extracted silk from more than 1 million
female golden orb spiders, which are abundant throughout Madagascar and known
for the rich golden color of their silk. Because the spiders only produce silk
during the rainy season, workers collected all the spiders between October and
June.
Then
an additional 12 people used hand-powered machines to extract the silk and
weave it into 96-filament thread. Once the spiders had been milked, they were
released into back into the wild, where Godley said it takes them about a week
to regenerate their silk. “We can go back and re-silk the same spiders,” he
said. “It’s like the gift that never stops giving.”
Of
course, spending four years to produce a single textile of spider silk isn’t
very practical for scientists trying to study the properties of spider silk or
companies that want to manufacture the fabric for use as a biomedical scaffold
or an alternative to Kevlar armor. Several groups have tried inserting spider
genes into bacteria (or even cows and goats) to produce silk, but so
far, the attempts have been only moderately successful.
Part
of the reason it’s so hard to generate spider silk in the lab is that it starts
out as a liquid protein that’s produced by a special gland in the spider’s
abdomen. Using their spinnerets, spiders apply a physical force to rearrange
the protein’s molecular structure and turn it into solid silk.
“When
we talk about a spider spinning silk, we’re talking about how the spider
applies forces to produce a physical transformation from liquid to solid,” said
spider silk expert Todd Blackledge of the University of Akron, who was not
involved in creating the textile. “Scientists simply can’t replicate that as
well as a spider does it. Every year we’re getting closer and closer to being
able to mass-produce it, but we’re not there yet.”
For
now, it seems we’ll have to be content with one incredibly beautiful cloth,
graciously provided by more than a million spiders.
Images:
1) AMNH/R. Mickens 2) Nicholas Godley and Simon Peers
How
much is this golden silk fabric per meter? We do not know and we do not have to
know as there is nowhere you can buy. But we can buy mulberry silk fabrics,
which is most widely used as luxurious fabrics for wedding gowns or other
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Time
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SilkChiffon 8mm(weight) 140cm(width) ===About USD6.50/mtr
SilkSatin Charmeuse 19mm(weight) 140cm(width) ===About USD13.00/mtr
SilkCrepe De Chine 40mm(weight) 140cm(width)=== About USD25.00/mtr
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