...Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley can tell you why it may require a village — and four years or more — to create a single major textile from spider silk. But their team’s effort is so magnificent that starting today the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, has it on display. You’ve got six months to see it there, after which you’ll have to go museum hopping in London to catch up with it.
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It took a lot of spiders to make the 11-by-4-foot fringed tapestry that went on display today. Some 1,063,000 individuals, give or take (although it’s certainly possible some were silked more than once). Teams of up to 80 people went out every day carefully collecting spiders from webs in town and the countryside. Spider wranglers would rebox each silked animal for release back into the wild a few hours later.
In theory, no spider gave her life for the production of Peers’ and Godley’s arachno-craft.
Of course, it would have been easier if the weavers could just have farmed their spiders, silking them at regular intervals. Alas, Peers notes, the females are cannibalistic “so we’d have had this endlessly diminishing stock.”
44 square foot tapestry made from spider silk
Originally Posted by Think
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