A spectacular and extremely rare textile, woven from golden-colored silk thread produced by more than one million spiders in Madagascar, goes on display Wednesday, September 23 in the American Museum of Natural History’s Grand Gallery. This magnificent contemporary textile, measuring 11 feet by 4 feet, took four years to make using a painstaking technique developed more than 100 years ago.
The spiders were collected during the rainy season from their webs on telephone wires using poles.
About 24 metres of the strongest “dragline” type silk filament were then extracted from each individual of Nephila madagascariensis. After they had been “silked”, the spiders were released back into the wild.
Spiders’ silk is three times as strong as Kevlar and five times as strong as steel, but can stretch up to 40 per cent of its length. Work is under way to sequence spider genes to produce synthetic silk.
I want that curator’s job! Lucky man.