SPIDER SILK HARVESTING IN APPAREL INDUSTRY

Although most people dread walking into spider webs in the yard and spiders do not make good house pets, researchers believe spider silk could one day alter medicine. Spiders have attracted humans for thousands of years; the Diné myth of Spider Woman and the Greek myth of Arachne are just two examples. I adore spiders, so I get excited whenever I get to pause and watch one weave a web. I’d like to believe it’s because I respect great craftsmanship and handspun fibers. In addition, I’m curious what it’s like to weave with spider silk, a delicate, ethereal substance.

The earliest large-scale spider silk weaving that I could find was done in the late 1800s by a French Jesuit priest named Jacob Paul Camboué. Camboué was deployed to Madagascar, home of the golden orb spider, as part of his missionary activities. Being an entomologist, he was captivated to the idea of gathering spider silk, maybe in an attempt to compete with China’s silk trade.More than a century later, after learning about Camboué and his experiment, Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley decided to try their hand at producing spider silk cloth. The properties of spider silk are as incredible as they sound. Dragline silk from orb web spiders can take more energy than bulletproof Kevlar and can restore its shape without losing elasticity. No other living organism has ever generated a substance as durable as this one, and nothing created by humans comes close. Humans have always been fascinated with spider silk, and the current rush in research around the turn of the century is just one chapter in a much bigger tale.

In the early 1700s, the president of the French Royal Society of Sciences experimented by hand-spinning silk threads from spider egg sacs. The French Jesuit missionary Jacob Paul Camboué visited Madagascar. Over the course of five years, Madagascar’s two inhabitants organized a group of eighty people to gather and harvest spider silk from more than a million golden orbs Spiders.

Scientists then focused on developing artificial silk manufactured in a laboratory rather than using real spider silk. This involved brewing genetically engineered E. Coli bacteria in big vats for specific individuals. Some took a more risky approach, and the world met Sugar and Spice, the first two genetically modified spider-goats, in 1999. Despite their usual goat look, the milk they produced contained a large amount of spider silk protein. Silk proteins generated from bacteria and genetically engineered goats are dissolved in fluid and must be processed chemically and physically in order to form fibers.

Dr. Mahima Nand

Head of Department

Fashion Design

Kalinga University Raipur