The golden silk woven from the silk of a million spiders on the island of Madagascar is a unique masterpiece in the world.
The world’s largest and rarest silk cloth made entirely from the silk of the golden globe weaver spider was displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 2009, according to Ancient Origins. This is believed to be the only large cloth woven from natural spider silk that exists in the world today.
Artisans weave and embroider spider silk shawls. (Video: Vimeo).
This masterpiece canvas is a project of Simon Peers, the British art historian specializing in fabric studies, and Nicholas Godley , the American merchant. The project took 5 years to complete with a cost of 395,820 USD. The result from the project is a canvas measuring 3.4 x 1.2 meters.
Peers and Godley’s product is a gold brocade shawl . The inspiration for the cloth came from a 19th-century French record. The record describes the efforts of French missionary Paul Camboué to exploit and produce cloth from spider silk. Father Camboué is considered the first to achieve success in this field. However, spider silk was harvested in ancient times for a variety of purposes. For example, the ancient Greeks used spider silk to stop bleeding from wounds.
Spider silk scarves on display in the museum. (Photo: Blogspot).
While on a mission in Madagascar, Father Camboué used a species of spider available on the island to produce spider silk. He cooperated with a merchant named M. Nogué to open the spider silk industry. Their products attracted a lot of attention at the time and inspired Peers and Gogley to reimagine silk mining a century later.
Peers builds a replica of the silk-mining machine invented by Nogué. The small, hand-controlled machine can draw the webs of 24 spiders at once without hurting them. The spider used by the couple to make the cloth is the red-footed golden orb weaver spider (Nephila inaurata), native to eastern and southeastern Africa, as well as some western Indian islands. Oceania, including Madagascar. Only female spiders of this species are capable of spinning webs. Their nets light up in the sun to attract prey or for camouflage.
Exquisite embroidery on the surface of the silk shawl. (Image: Wikipedia).
Peers and Godley had to catch up to a million female spiders to make enough shawl fabric. They are lucky because this is a common spider and they are widely distributed on the island. The spiders are released back into the wild after running out of silk. But after only a week, they were able to produce silk again. This spider only releases silk during the rainy season, so Peers’ team only catches spiders between June and October.
A female golden orb weaver spider. (Image: Wikipedia).
The yellow scarf was born after 4 years, proving that spider silk can really be used to make fabric. But mass production of spider silk is not easy. When together, spiders tend to be cannibals.
Spider silk is exceptionally strong, yet very light and resilient. Therefore, many researchers have worked hard to find ways to exploit this silk by other methods. One method is to “embed” spider genes into other organisms such as bacteria, then harvest silk from them. But the methods yielded only minor success.
Some pictures of spider silk:
