GOLDEN ORB SPIDER SILK
“Spider silk is very elastic, and it has a tensile strength that is incredibly strong compared to steel or Kevlar”. It has long been known that certain fibers produced in nature possess remarkable mechanical properties in terms of strength, resilience and flexibility. These protein based fibers, exemplified by spider silk, have been a subject of much interest because of spider silk’s incredible toughness. While the superior properties of spider silk are well known, there was no other way to produce spider silk by commercial techniques.
ONE MILLION SPIDERS MAKE GOLDEN SILK FOR RARE CLOTH
A RARE TEXTILE made of silk, which is produced by more than a million wild spiders is displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people work extensively for four years and collect golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while more than a dozen workers carefully extract about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is only one of its kinds. This piece of cloth is made from Natural Spider Silk. But to make a textile of such significant size, the silk experts had to drastically scale up their project. “Fourteen thousand spiders yield about an ounce of silk and the textile weighs about 2.6 pounds. The numbers are crazy.” For now, it seems that we’ll have to be content with only one incredibly beautiful cloth, graciously provided by more than a million spiders.
SOLDIERS IN FUTURE MAY WEAR BULLETPOROOF UNIFORMS MADE OF SPIDER SILK
Ultra-strong spider silk, one of the toughest known natural fibers, can one day protect soldiers on the battlefield from bullets and other threats. Spider silk is light and flexible, and is lighter in weight compared to high-grade steel. Its potential applications span a wide range of industries, from surgical sutures for doctors to PROTECTIVE WEAR FOR MILITARY. But producing and harvesting enough spider silk to make these types of products commercially available poses a challenge. Spider silk in nature has truly unique properties. If you think about a spider's web, it is designed by nature to intercept an airborne missile — a fly or another flying insect. Similarly silk also naturally elongates and absorbs the energy of the captured prey .If you do the mathematical calculations — the weight of the fly, its speed, and the size of the individual fiber in which you capture it — the strength-to-weight ratio is off the scale. For soldiers in particular, spider silk can provide a new type of protection beyond the traditional, solid Kevlar vest.
- By Anubhuti Lal