Thursday, January 26, 2012

Shawls Made from Silk of over One Million Spiders


Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley teamed up to create materials from the silk produced from Golden Orb Spiders in Madagascar. They collected 1.2 million of these spiders and extracted their silk over the course of 3 years to create 2 golden silk capes.

This shawl is the world’s largest piece of spider-silk cloth ever created, which is now on display at the V&A Museum in London. No spiders were harmed in the making of the materials, and once the spider’s silk had been extracted, the spider was released back in to the wild where they replenished their silk supplies in about a week. Each spider extracts ~30-50 m of thread each time the silk is extracted.

via Gizmodo

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