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Question of the Day
Question:
"Dr. Hal, if silk comes from threads spun by caterpillars, can you make silk from the threads spun by spiders?"Answer:
A fairly interesting question. Never worry if a question's too dopey to ask, by the way. I answer anything that gets to my desk. The problem is, Chicken often intercepts questions he thinks beneath the dignity of the Dr. Hal Show. He protects me from such inane queries as, "Dr. Hal, are you Cuckoo for Cocoa-Puffs?" But of course I would have done my best to make that one "pay," ranting about blood sugar levels, juvenile hyperactivity, the potential addictive nature of phenylethylmine, perhaps a brief history of General Mills, and so on. But he has my best interests at heart, clearly. Anyway, back to the spiders. The silkworm uses silk for pupation only. It is difficult to rear, gets diseases, needs heat, needs special food for which there is no substitute, and dies if called upon to fast for even a negligible period. So why indeed do we mess with silkworms, instead of using the more plentiful, more beautiful, and stronger silk of the spider? True, it takes 50,000 spiders to produce one pound of silk, but they are easily fed. All their dietary needs can be met by flies, of which there are always a vigorous supply. Plenty more where they come from. Actually, it has been done-- in 1710, a Frenchman, Monsieur Bon, succeeded in making some stockings and mittens from spider silk, though at times he broke the thread, which can mar the luster to a certain degree... And he was not the first: reading in the Atlantic Monthly for June (1858, that is) we read that the Emperor Aurengzebe of Hindostan once "reproved his daughter for the indelicacy of her costume" although she was wearing seven thicknesses of spider silk. Furthermore, this silk is gorgeous. The Abbe Raymond de Termeyer found that silk could be drawn directly from a spider on to a spool, and between 1762 and 1796 he succeeded by this method. Once he drew off silk from a spider and a silkworm side by side and was amazed to find how much more beautiful was the spider silk. It was, he said, "...more like a Mirrour or Polish'd Metal than Silk." In 1863 a Mr. Wilder did the same thing. Securing a good-sized spider, he reeled off from her 150 yards of thread in one and a quarter hours. He said it was easy as milking a cow. But here's the hitch: you can't make a profit-- because you can't raise spiders together. If you try it with a vivarium full of, say, twenty spiders you will end up with a vivarium containing one single, very fat spider. They're ruthlessly competitive, you see, asocial, and all too willing to indulge a cannibal nature. In his invaluable book, The Life of the Spider, naturalist John Crompton writes, "The large tropical spiders yield the best and their thread is thicker. But these methods cannot be used commercially, so I fear that we will never see the beauty of shapely calves and ankles enhanced by the metallic sheen of arachnidian silk."
Askdrhal.com by
Jascha Ephraim,
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