The Friday Fillip

“. . . along came a spider and sat down beside her. . .” Which might give anyone pause, not only arachnophobes. These arthropods, which have two legs up on insects, don’t fuss me much — I was taught as a child never to harm a spider — something about bad luck — and so those that do cosy up to me usually get taken outside with some care. Even so, I can’t imagine doing what seventy people in Madagascar did not too long ago.

The intrepid Madagascarians (?) collected golden orb spiders (click to see – arachnophobe warning) every day during the rainy season for four years and took them in to a central location where they were milked for their web silk. A million spiders later, the resulting silk was woven into a cloth, a patch of which you see below.

The glorious gold is simply the colour of the natural spider silk, according to the article on the website of the American Museum of Natural History. The resultant cloth is woven in a traditional pattern reserved for royalty and is the only example of spider silk fabric in existence.

If you go to the AMNH site, there’s a video and a series of photographs that help to make the scale of the remarkable enterprise more vivid.

And just in case you’re like my parents and worry about the fate of the spiders, we’re told that, after serving in the “milking” machine for a time, all were released alive into the wild.