Talk

Nature, adapt thyself

Millions of years ago spiders were great ground hunters. However, something interesting happened. Bugs evolved to escape their predators, and started to fly. Spiders and other predators were now faced with a dwindling source of chow. The spider population started waning. The spiders started evolving to where they gained the ability to spin a nearly invisible web to trap their prey.

Our knowledge how the spider builds its web is still incomplete. We do know that spiders build dragline silk support structures and then the capture spiral. Spider web is among the strongest materials known to man. However, gathering enough spider web to use is a tough proposition. Silk worms make nice well behaved, herbaceous inhabitants of farms. This is how silk is gathered. Spiders are territorial and aggressive.

Companies have found a way to insert the web producing gene of a spider into a goat in way such that it turns on in the mammary gland and produces silk in the milk. This silk is separated from the milk and subjected to the same spinning process as in the spider to produce the spider silk.

Read more at the New York Times.