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.

Read more and watch a video here