1 Million Spiders Make Golden Silk for Rare Cloth

Wired wrote 1 Million Spiders Make Golden Silk for Rare Cloth.

"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."

"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."