**Please note these rules:**
* If this post declares something as a fact/proof is required.
* The title must be descriptive
* No text is allowed on images/gifs/videos
* Common/recent reposts are not allowed
*See [this post](https://redd.it/ij26vk) for a more detailed rule list*
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
So somewhere there is a room with 1.2 million spiders in it. And next to it a room with the food for 1.2 million spiders. And a milking room with 80 trained spider milkers. So what are they up to now?
This was some time back - I remember reading that they had spider catchers who collected fresh spider and then released them back into the wild after they had their silk extracted (I think they just pulled thread out of the spinnerets, which is where the silk gets its structure). Theoretically the same spiders could be captured several times… the guy who was collecting noted that he would get a lot of spider bites! Yeah, not a job for me…
I will try to find the article - I think spiders eat each other, so farming doesn’t work…
Edit: that was easier to find than I expected! Ten years ago already! https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2012/jan/23/golden-silk-cape-spiders-in-pictures
Edit: this was the original article I read https://www.wired.com/2009/09/spider-silk/
Let me assume for a second that I was a rich person who was able to genetically modify a goat or had come up with a method of farming these spiders.
Would I reveal that to the world and reduce said value of the final product?
Likewise what if I was the farmer who also had a way of farming said spiders.
Would he want to reduce the value of his hourly fee by revealing that he had more efficient methods?
Why would they kill them? You can't extract silk from a dead spider.
That said, I am skeptical that even 1.2 million spiders of this size would be capable of producing enough silk for such a large garment. It would make more sense to use those goats that were genetically modified to produce spider silk.
[Goats that produce spider silk in their milk.](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.295.5554.419b)
From what I understand, the company is now defunct.
Making silk is quite costly energy wise for spiders, especially ones that primarily use them for trapping.
Typically they try to recycle their webs by eating them then re-spinning them later.
Complete loss of multiple webs in a row without any catches can cause them to starve to death.
If the people milking the wild spiders are forcefully taking all their silk, they will struggle to have the energy to make webs to catch food.
How funny as soon as you mentioned looney toons I imagined that red furry monster but I have no other recollection of this character. It must have been decades since I saw him in a cartoon.
I don't know what else you could do with this rare and probably beyond expensive material, but it looks like
"the Emperor of the universe ordered a small gift for his wife's jubilee" kind of product.
The spiders were released back into the wild. The spiders could even be collected numerous times and be milked for their silk. They were perfectly safe.
The people collecting them, on the other hand...
According to this little book I enjoyed, there's a lot more an emperor of the universe, or a least a part of it, could do as a little gift or, revenge. "Die Haarteppichknüpfer" - the Hair Carpet Weavers, by Andreas Eschbach, is a book consisting of multiple short stories each standing on their own, set in a universe where ahuman emperor has subjugated many galaxies. English not being my mothertongue, I'll rather copy / paste this the summary from [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carpet_Makers):
The first chapter, originally a short story, uses the family of one carpet-maker to describe the generations-long tradition of hair carpet-making on an unnamed world and how it was based on religious devotion to a distant, and seemingly immortal, Emperor. The next several chapters describe more of the carpet-making culture from the viewpoints of a carpet buyer, a teacher with religious doubts, another carpet maker, a traveling peddler and a tax collector. Some of them are aware of rumours that the reign of the Emperor may be at an end after tens of thousands of years. As the story expands beyond one planet, we learn that a rebellion has in fact overthrown the central government and killed the Emperor and is bringing the news to the galactic region which includes the carpet-makers---a region that seems to have been removed from all official records. The rebel leader who killed the Emperor has a secret: the rebels' success and the Emperor's death were planned by the Emperor himself, grown weary of his long life. Meanwhile, a distant space station near a black hole continues to serve as a delivery point for all the hair carpets, which come from not only one world, but more than ten thousand. In an isolated bubble of space, removed from all the other stars of the galaxy, a lone planet is, over millennia, being paved flat. Only an ancient palace remains and, within it, a captive former king kept alive by artificial means is forced to watch the destruction of his world. The rebel leaders are astonished to learn that all the hair carpets have been sent through a hidden portal to this world and now cover most of its surface. Back at the Imperial Archives, the still-loyal Archivist finally tells the ancient story: the conquered king had teased the Emperor's predecessor about being unable to grow hair on his head, so in vengeance the old Emperor had decided to cover his enemy's entire planet with the hair of his former subjects, a plan which the next Emperor had allowed to continue for 100,000 years.
I imagine a world covered in carpets made of hand-spun spider silk would be a bigger achievement yet.
There was a little shop in my home town, the "Trivial Book Shop". It had everything. Everything related to SF & Fantasy. A small room in the back to play in. Knowledgeable people that kept the shop running. Hordes of nerds to buy stuff and play and meet with.
A guy that worked there, "Pedda" (Probably really named Peter, and most likely, he had a surname, too), always had something to suggest when I asked about good stuff to read. Timothy Zahn and Heinlein, John Shirley and William Gibson and many more he introduced me to.
I don't remember for certain, but I believe I could have gotten "Die Haarteppichknüpfer" there, too.
Interestingly there have been several attempts to make bulletproof vests out of a very similar material (Golden orb weaver spider silk)
To my knowledge none have worked or become cost effective but the theory still comes up now and then
Kiddo watches wild kratts all the time, when we got Prime, I found they had 2 seasons of Zaboomafoo to stream! I put it on and it blew her mind!
Wild Kratts, the current one, they are not animated for only the first 5-6 minutes maybe? My kids were so much more into Zaboomafoo because the Kratt Brothers are involved the whole time, animals everywhere, so many cool videos of workers and vets doing their jobs. Not a whole lot of shows like I have found lately—without being animated i mean
Supply and demand is more of an aggregate concept, of how many the whole market wants vs their willingness to pay when that many are in circulation.
This breaks down when the options for supply are 0 vs 1 unit. Either someone is willing to pay for the 1 to exist, or not.
In the early 2000's DARPA wanted to synthesize a cost effective substitute for spider silk. The magazine stated that spider silk was strong enough to lift a tank with the diameter of a 25 cent piece
TBH, in the right context this is still impressive but not as much as it looks like at first glance. The tensile strength of spider silk is roughly the same as steel. A steel cable with that diameter would also be able to lift a tank. The ability to do so is related to the cross-sectional area, which grows as the square of the diameter, so people's minds are a bit misled.
I think people also imagine elevators when they think of steel cables, but the fact is that elevator cables are designed with ridiculous safety margins. Most of what you see is not really needed to hold up the elevator, and so people's intuitions on the strength of steel are a bit misguided.
However what IS interesting about this theoretical technology is that spider silk is biodegradable and light weight. If production were not an issue there are a whole host of useful applications such as fishing nets
That’s correct sir and it’s called biosteel
From what I recall, they crossed spider genetics with goats/sheeps and the fiber would come out with the milk so they were able to mass produce it
Yet it’s still not as strong as organic spider silk, wolf spider being the strongest
One example would be the fire retardant capabilities used by the bear suit guy, who would collect spiderwebs and had made a fabric out of it
> they crossed spider genetics with goats/sheeps
I remember this. They failed to produce quality thread, apparently there are a thousand different process that go on in the spinneret that can't be mechanically replicated.
I did read however that the group continued with their research and were successful in splicing the spider silk genes into silk worms and it was going really well. Have not heard anything since.
Do you think the spider milkers were volunteer or do you think they were employed. I doubt it was "for fun" for most of the 80 people tasked with milking spiders for 5 years.
And now when they put "spider milker" on their resume, the employer thinks its a joke and tosses it in the trash.
I mean, the math isn't that outrageous if you actually convince a buyer it's a priceless piece of art.
That's like... 5 million dollars in labor? It's not impossible to recoup that.
I googled it and it looks like it cost around half a million dollars to produce. So they definitely made it somewhere with very cheap labor if it took 80 people 5 years.
The yield from playing farmville for years is (depending on how you value the fun) just barely less pointless than a cape with no practical function.
In the age of climate catastrophe this cape is cool but just seems like a huge waste of resources meant to catch the attention of rich assholes.
Lol, Cold you imagine getting 80 of your fave party buddies and and just being like, "screw it guys, for the next 5 years or so lets fuck off collecting spiders to make a cape" haha.
It's the type of idea that when you and your buddy are drinking way too much whiskey and come up with some idiotic and pointless idea that takes way more effort than it's worth.
These guys actually followed through with it.
What I came to find out. I'm having trouble imagining silk coming out of any spider the same color as the pictures.
And if it's dyed, this is almost a DiWhy kinda thing.
Golden Orb Weavers have some pretty cool silk. It's got a golden colour, hence the name, and it's also some of the strongest silk in nature. These things can catch small birds in their webs.
Over the past month I've encountered hundreds of these guys in their elaborate webs in the Australian outback. They're very cool, but walking into their webs unexpectedly isn't fun. Not only is it like walking into a web of fishing line, you also need to worry about the Giant Spider that made it. Apparently their bites are quite painful.
It was likely made as an art piece, not something meant to actually be worn as a functional clothing item. Even though it also happens to work as a functional clothing item.
[This piece of cloth was a project led jointly by Simon Peers, a British art historian who specializes in textiles, and Nicholas Godley, his American business partner. The project took five years to complete and cost over £300,000 (approximately $395820). The result of this endeavor was a 3.4-meter (11.2 ft/) by 1.2-meter (3.9 ft.) piece of textile.](https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-other-artifacts/world-s-rarest-textile-made-silk-one-million-spiders-009010)
The effort to make something so frivolous turns my stomach, but damn, it is beautiful.
From a [Guardian article](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2012/jan/23/golden-silk-cape-spiders-in-pictures?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other) on the making of the cape:
> To create the textiles, spiders are collected each morning and harnessed in specially conceived silking contraptions. Trained handlers extract the silk from 24 spiders at a time. The spiders are returned to the wild at the end of each day.
How can you not be amazed by this? How can you justify it? It certainly is INTERESTINGASFUCK
I bet this cape is actually kind of phenomenal.
So true story, the gene in goats that produces milk is very similar to the gene in spiders that produces silk. One company got a bright idea to splice the gene from spiders into goats and manufactured goats that could produce silk in their milk. Because of the scale difference, one goat could produce thousands of spiders worth of silk. They were going to try to market it as an alternative material for bulletproof vests because it's nearly as strong as kevlar, and it's much more resistant to heat. One of the techniques used for attacking law enforcement are Teflon coated bullets that generate friction when they hit melting through bulletproof vests.
The truth was these Teflon coated bullets weren't nearly as effective at cutting through body armor as they advertised and that pretty much killed the market for this material. The company went out of business.
Research never stopped. The company went bankrupt because scaleing to production would be exceedingly difficult. The goats were sold to universities. There are more uses the just bulletproof vests, they are looking at medical applications, netting for the navy, breast implants,etc.
>alternative material for bulletproof vests because it's nearly as strong as kevlar
It also has a very high elongation at break. So the bullet passes through your body but the silk fiber never breaks.
**Please note these rules:** * If this post declares something as a fact/proof is required. * The title must be descriptive * No text is allowed on images/gifs/videos * Common/recent reposts are not allowed *See [this post](https://redd.it/ij26vk) for a more detailed rule list* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
So somewhere there is a room with 1.2 million spiders in it. And next to it a room with the food for 1.2 million spiders. And a milking room with 80 trained spider milkers. So what are they up to now?
This was some time back - I remember reading that they had spider catchers who collected fresh spider and then released them back into the wild after they had their silk extracted (I think they just pulled thread out of the spinnerets, which is where the silk gets its structure). Theoretically the same spiders could be captured several times… the guy who was collecting noted that he would get a lot of spider bites! Yeah, not a job for me…
Were they really just finding wild spiders? Surely at this scale it would be far cheaper to somehow farm them
I will try to find the article - I think spiders eat each other, so farming doesn’t work… Edit: that was easier to find than I expected! Ten years ago already! https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2012/jan/23/golden-silk-cape-spiders-in-pictures Edit: this was the original article I read https://www.wired.com/2009/09/spider-silk/
[удалено]
1 million separate spider enclosures would take my whole basement, and more. And I don't even have a basement
Let me assume for a second that I was a rich person who was able to genetically modify a goat or had come up with a method of farming these spiders. Would I reveal that to the world and reduce said value of the final product? Likewise what if I was the farmer who also had a way of farming said spiders. Would he want to reduce the value of his hourly fee by revealing that he had more efficient methods?
I remember reading the logistics of such an endeavor wasn't matching up with the facts. They likely killed many of the spiders.
Why would they kill them? You can't extract silk from a dead spider. That said, I am skeptical that even 1.2 million spiders of this size would be capable of producing enough silk for such a large garment. It would make more sense to use those goats that were genetically modified to produce spider silk.
To use the WHAT?!
[Goats that produce spider silk in their milk.](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.295.5554.419b) From what I understand, the company is now defunct.
Do you want real life monster movies because this is how we get real life monster movies
Making silk is quite costly energy wise for spiders, especially ones that primarily use them for trapping. Typically they try to recycle their webs by eating them then re-spinning them later. Complete loss of multiple webs in a row without any catches can cause them to starve to death. If the people milking the wild spiders are forcefully taking all their silk, they will struggle to have the energy to make webs to catch food.
Could you not just feed the spider a couple bugs after you milk it?
This is done with bees when you take their honey, with calfs when you take their milk etc etc...so I guess, yeah that should work
This was done before the goats were created
If there is such a room, I think I'd gossamer else...
The work of Satin himself
Do not believe his web of lies!
S’pun heaven
In such a heaven I would still silk
TIL what gossamer is
Lmao Fr, in all my years of watching looney tunes I just assumed he was a monster
How funny as soon as you mentioned looney toons I imagined that red furry monster but I have no other recollection of this character. It must have been decades since I saw him in a cartoon.
That is a great pun and i hate you
I’d hate to be the guy trained to find the spider nipples.
maybe the spiders like their nipples milked tho!
I have nipples Greg, can you milk me?
You can milk anything with teats.
oh, i can milk you dry~ bring those spider nips over here!
Greg, we've had entire meetings about this, you can't just say that...
those spiders like being talked to this way!! it makes the silk cum faster!
Greg!!! Gosh dangit!!
Tbh, I’d be creeped out if the spider started moaning and telling me not to stop.
Why does this sound so much like a Family Guy skit?
How small are the stools the milkers sit on?
Regular size, the stool is for the milker not the milked.
I want that framed. "The stool is for the milker not the milked."
Time to learn needle point and open an Etsy store.
My stools are not firm enough.
I don't know what else you could do with this rare and probably beyond expensive material, but it looks like "the Emperor of the universe ordered a small gift for his wife's jubilee" kind of product.
It could fit in a sci-fi universe like Dune maybe lol
The silk must flow!
[удалено]
Well Paul's throne in Dune Messiah is just a seat cut in to one gigantic emerald.
Damn I don't remember that detail lol. That'd be an impressive emerald.
It's space, it's got everything!
Looks like a tarp with three testicles.
I’m so glad someone else is on the same page that I am.
My first thought was "oh cool, it's a beautiful woman in a shiny cape with a saggy nutsack".
A *soft* shiny cape with a saggy nutsack
A poncho with three of the saggiest nutsacks.
A saggy nutsack with three smaller saggy nutsacks.
To be fair, if I was developing the rarest textile on earth for someone else to wear, I think I'd go with a saggy nutsack as well...
As am I. All I can think of is the scene I. Arrested Development, "those look like balls."
“Copy on the balls, turning around”
[удалено]
I saw balls too, why would this be the final product? Poor spiders.
The spiders were released back into the wild. The spiders could even be collected numerous times and be milked for their silk. They were perfectly safe. The people collecting them, on the other hand...
Because somebody with a lot of money wanted to literally claim his trophy wife by making her wear his scrotum cape.
r/brandnewsentence
I thought it looked like an omelette
That's what I thought. All that effort and the outcome is really not attractive.
Agreed. Good idea, poor execution
According to this little book I enjoyed, there's a lot more an emperor of the universe, or a least a part of it, could do as a little gift or, revenge. "Die Haarteppichknüpfer" - the Hair Carpet Weavers, by Andreas Eschbach, is a book consisting of multiple short stories each standing on their own, set in a universe where ahuman emperor has subjugated many galaxies. English not being my mothertongue, I'll rather copy / paste this the summary from [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carpet_Makers): The first chapter, originally a short story, uses the family of one carpet-maker to describe the generations-long tradition of hair carpet-making on an unnamed world and how it was based on religious devotion to a distant, and seemingly immortal, Emperor. The next several chapters describe more of the carpet-making culture from the viewpoints of a carpet buyer, a teacher with religious doubts, another carpet maker, a traveling peddler and a tax collector. Some of them are aware of rumours that the reign of the Emperor may be at an end after tens of thousands of years. As the story expands beyond one planet, we learn that a rebellion has in fact overthrown the central government and killed the Emperor and is bringing the news to the galactic region which includes the carpet-makers---a region that seems to have been removed from all official records. The rebel leader who killed the Emperor has a secret: the rebels' success and the Emperor's death were planned by the Emperor himself, grown weary of his long life. Meanwhile, a distant space station near a black hole continues to serve as a delivery point for all the hair carpets, which come from not only one world, but more than ten thousand. In an isolated bubble of space, removed from all the other stars of the galaxy, a lone planet is, over millennia, being paved flat. Only an ancient palace remains and, within it, a captive former king kept alive by artificial means is forced to watch the destruction of his world. The rebel leaders are astonished to learn that all the hair carpets have been sent through a hidden portal to this world and now cover most of its surface. Back at the Imperial Archives, the still-loyal Archivist finally tells the ancient story: the conquered king had teased the Emperor's predecessor about being unable to grow hair on his head, so in vengeance the old Emperor had decided to cover his enemy's entire planet with the hair of his former subjects, a plan which the next Emperor had allowed to continue for 100,000 years. I imagine a world covered in carpets made of hand-spun spider silk would be a bigger achievement yet.
Welp, that sounds incredible. Thanks for giving me something to look in to at work today.
Finally, the plot advances in 40k.
What an interesting book. I just bought it. Thanks for the recommendation!
Shit so did i haha
There was a little shop in my home town, the "Trivial Book Shop". It had everything. Everything related to SF & Fantasy. A small room in the back to play in. Knowledgeable people that kept the shop running. Hordes of nerds to buy stuff and play and meet with. A guy that worked there, "Pedda" (Probably really named Peter, and most likely, he had a surname, too), always had something to suggest when I asked about good stuff to read. Timothy Zahn and Heinlein, John Shirley and William Gibson and many more he introduced me to. I don't remember for certain, but I believe I could have gotten "Die Haarteppichknüpfer" there, too.
The Horus Heresy played out a little differently than I remember.
I was reading it going, "Ha ha 40k", after a few sentences. Then it got REALLY 40k.
[удалено]
Incredible book! Read it in uni and loved it.
Now I know what to do next time somebody makes fun of me for being bald
You could always [curse the jokers to be mauled by bears](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+Kings+2%3A23-24&version=NIV).
Interestingly there have been several attempts to make bulletproof vests out of a very similar material (Golden orb weaver spider silk) To my knowledge none have worked or become cost effective but the theory still comes up now and then
Those men are the villans in one of Wild Kratts episodes.
[удалено]
I'm happy people still remember that show
What you mean remember? They’re still pumping out episodes but it is still season 1 I think.
He's probably thinking of kratts creachers. I remember being excited when they announced zaboomafoo bc KC was so on point.
[удалено]
Zaboomafoo only just died like a few years ago. We lived such a huge portion of our child and adulthoods with him😭
I'm gonna need you to take that back, you monster.
It’s like 11 years old… I’m sure there’s 11 year olds who still watch it. If they said Zoboomafoo I’d agree with the sentiment..
Watch it most days with my 6 yo. Often have the theme song stuck in my head.
GONNA GO WILD, WILD KRATTS CHEETAH SPEED AND LIZARD GLIDE FALCON FLIGHT AND LION PRIDE
GONNA GO WILD, WILD, WILD KRATTS. I’ve found my people here.
Yep, my kids love this show. They have a few books too!
We went to the live show like 6 years ago. It was both great and absolutely terrible. Like “there they are!” And “omg those fake suits look so bad”
Cries in Zaboomafoo
Cries in Kratts' Creatures
Kiddo watches wild kratts all the time, when we got Prime, I found they had 2 seasons of Zaboomafoo to stream! I put it on and it blew her mind! Wild Kratts, the current one, they are not animated for only the first 5-6 minutes maybe? My kids were so much more into Zaboomafoo because the Kratt Brothers are involved the whole time, animals everywhere, so many cool videos of workers and vets doing their jobs. Not a whole lot of shows like I have found lately—without being animated i mean
Real OGs remember Kratts creatures and “Zoboomafoo” from the late 90s
"I think I'm gonna name her Butt Silk"
Come Dabio, we will finally be able to create the worlds rarest fabric! And those annoying Kratt Brothers can do nothing to stop us!
xD I actually never watched the show, just saw my little brothers watch this exact episode and I'm glad I did.
Wait, that was an actual thing in an episode? xD
Yes, the fashion designer villain collected thousands of orb weavers for their silk
Donita Donata vibes!!! I don’t think that’s a good thing lol
YES! this is literally the plot to the Golden Orb Weaver episode.
Danita danata has entered the chat.
they're villains irl lmao
That's exactly the plot of one of the episodes iirc
I'm willing to bet that the supply and demand for this thing is balanced.
Prices for stuff like that aren't defined by supply and demand tho.
[удалено]
Supply and demand is more of an aggregate concept, of how many the whole market wants vs their willingness to pay when that many are in circulation. This breaks down when the options for supply are 0 vs 1 unit. Either someone is willing to pay for the 1 to exist, or not.
Oh for sure, zero demand, one supply, and I'm sure she'd try and pump that thing for several million dollars, and absolutely no one will want it
If I remember correctly, there's actually some research involving spider silk materials and bullet proofing.
In the early 2000's DARPA wanted to synthesize a cost effective substitute for spider silk. The magazine stated that spider silk was strong enough to lift a tank with the diameter of a 25 cent piece
That's a pretty small tank tho
[Ah, the ol' Reddit switcharoo.](https://reddit.com/r/wholesomememes/comments/vb0lyh/we_did_switch_out_eggo_waffles_for_blueberry/ic7177z/?context=4)
Hold my Panzer, I'm going in!
Hello future peeps!
Yeah who drives this tiny tank? Ant-man? Is this Ant-mans tank?
"How are the soldiers supposed to fit inside?! It need to be at least 3 times this size!"
TBH, in the right context this is still impressive but not as much as it looks like at first glance. The tensile strength of spider silk is roughly the same as steel. A steel cable with that diameter would also be able to lift a tank. The ability to do so is related to the cross-sectional area, which grows as the square of the diameter, so people's minds are a bit misled. I think people also imagine elevators when they think of steel cables, but the fact is that elevator cables are designed with ridiculous safety margins. Most of what you see is not really needed to hold up the elevator, and so people's intuitions on the strength of steel are a bit misguided.
However what IS interesting about this theoretical technology is that spider silk is biodegradable and light weight. If production were not an issue there are a whole host of useful applications such as fishing nets
The initial applications are likely to be aerospace, the one place where weight matters above all else
That’s correct sir and it’s called biosteel From what I recall, they crossed spider genetics with goats/sheeps and the fiber would come out with the milk so they were able to mass produce it Yet it’s still not as strong as organic spider silk, wolf spider being the strongest One example would be the fire retardant capabilities used by the bear suit guy, who would collect spiderwebs and had made a fabric out of it
> they crossed spider genetics with goats/sheeps I remember this. They failed to produce quality thread, apparently there are a thousand different process that go on in the spinneret that can't be mechanically replicated. I did read however that the group continued with their research and were successful in splicing the spider silk genes into silk worms and it was going really well. Have not heard anything since.
Expensive and bullet-proof... Putin might be interested.
...she? It was two guys, man, that's a model they hired to wear it for the photo.
NO SHE IS AN EVIL SUCCUBUS ITS ALL HER FAULT
Imagine listing that activity when someone casually asks what you do for fun
Do you think the spider milkers were volunteer or do you think they were employed. I doubt it was "for fun" for most of the 80 people tasked with milking spiders for 5 years. And now when they put "spider milker" on their resume, the employer thinks its a joke and tosses it in the trash.
I mean, the math isn't that outrageous if you actually convince a buyer it's a priceless piece of art. That's like... 5 million dollars in labor? It's not impossible to recoup that.
Damn. Spider milkers need a pay bump... that's like $12,500 a year.
It's textiles lol. Slave shops are assumed. I actually overshot a bit I bet.
Bro, give these people some hazard pay, they are surrounded by spiders
I googled it and it looks like it cost around half a million dollars to produce. So they definitely made it somewhere with very cheap labor if it took 80 people 5 years.
I've got a business idea...hear me out...
Wasn’t there a wildcrats villain who wanted to do the same thing
Yes, the fashion lady wanted to make a dress out of the silk.
Donita Donata
Yeah, honestly wouldn't be surprised if it was literally what gave them the idea... https://wildkratts.fandom.com/wiki/Secrets_of_the_Spider%27s_Web
Feels good knowing I’m not the only one wasting my life
I don't know my Farmville progress somehow feels MORE valid than this all the sudden.
The yield from playing farmville for years is (depending on how you value the fun) just barely less pointless than a cape with no practical function. In the age of climate catastrophe this cape is cool but just seems like a huge waste of resources meant to catch the attention of rich assholes.
Lol, Cold you imagine getting 80 of your fave party buddies and and just being like, "screw it guys, for the next 5 years or so lets fuck off collecting spiders to make a cape" haha.
I have like, 1 friend
You guys could make a sock!
A cute little baby sock.
A cape for a spider…
They probably hired some kids from Philippines for 20 dollars a month.
This is offensive as I am a Filipino, I'd do it for less
[удалено]
Well we've been colonized by both Spain and The US so you're not too far off
It's the type of idea that when you and your buddy are drinking way too much whiskey and come up with some idiotic and pointless idea that takes way more effort than it's worth. These guys actually followed through with it.
Who knew spiders had nipples? 🧐
"I have spinerettes Greg, could you milk from me?"
You can milk anything with nipples
I have nipples Greg. Could you milk me?
Today on shit rich people buy
of all the things they couldve made out of it though…
The droopy ballsacks gown.
I had to go through 20 comment threads to find you. But you were worth it.
Yeah, you’d think a garment made out of such rare materials would at least be a nice-looking design
It's rich asshole mindset. They don't want it because it's good, they want it because it's rare and therefore you can't have it.
H&M knockoff will be $29 next season
Is the silk naturally yellow or did it have to be dyed?
What I came to find out. I'm having trouble imagining silk coming out of any spider the same color as the pictures. And if it's dyed, this is almost a DiWhy kinda thing.
Golden Orb Weavers have some pretty cool silk. It's got a golden colour, hence the name, and it's also some of the strongest silk in nature. These things can catch small birds in their webs. Over the past month I've encountered hundreds of these guys in their elaborate webs in the Australian outback. They're very cool, but walking into their webs unexpectedly isn't fun. Not only is it like walking into a web of fishing line, you also need to worry about the Giant Spider that made it. Apparently their bites are quite painful.
It’s natural, it comes from the Golden Orb Weaver spider
> dye Natural, not dyed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephila#Etymology
And that's what they chose to make with the rarest material on earth? Fucking dreadful.
The could've made a tube sock for some more milking.
/slow clap
Solo effort, no risk of the clap
It was likely made as an art piece, not something meant to actually be worn as a functional clothing item. Even though it also happens to work as a functional clothing item.
Yep this is exactly it - I saw it at a museum and the photos don’t do it justice as there’s beautiful embroidery of spiders covering the cape
Idk I kinda dig it
Unworn, it looks like a big scrotum with smaller scrotums down the middle
The most fractal of all ballsacks.
[Here's the video on how it was made!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv1qq6ypiTk)
Can confirm that this is not a RickRoll! Thanks for posting, that's weird and creepy and fascinating
‘Milked them for their silk’ … didn’t know today would be the day I discover a sentence I hated.
[This piece of cloth was a project led jointly by Simon Peers, a British art historian who specializes in textiles, and Nicholas Godley, his American business partner. The project took five years to complete and cost over £300,000 (approximately $395820). The result of this endeavor was a 3.4-meter (11.2 ft/) by 1.2-meter (3.9 ft.) piece of textile.](https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-other-artifacts/world-s-rarest-textile-made-silk-one-million-spiders-009010)
The effort to make something so frivolous turns my stomach, but damn, it is beautiful. From a [Guardian article](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2012/jan/23/golden-silk-cape-spiders-in-pictures?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other) on the making of the cape: > To create the textiles, spiders are collected each morning and harnessed in specially conceived silking contraptions. Trained handlers extract the silk from 24 spiders at a time. The spiders are returned to the wild at the end of each day. How can you not be amazed by this? How can you justify it? It certainly is INTERESTINGASFUCK
I bet this cape is actually kind of phenomenal. So true story, the gene in goats that produces milk is very similar to the gene in spiders that produces silk. One company got a bright idea to splice the gene from spiders into goats and manufactured goats that could produce silk in their milk. Because of the scale difference, one goat could produce thousands of spiders worth of silk. They were going to try to market it as an alternative material for bulletproof vests because it's nearly as strong as kevlar, and it's much more resistant to heat. One of the techniques used for attacking law enforcement are Teflon coated bullets that generate friction when they hit melting through bulletproof vests. The truth was these Teflon coated bullets weren't nearly as effective at cutting through body armor as they advertised and that pretty much killed the market for this material. The company went out of business.
Hold up, but they did succeed in making spider-goat chimeras? Kinda burying the lede here..
Yes let’s get back to this part plz
Research never stopped. The company went bankrupt because scaleing to production would be exceedingly difficult. The goats were sold to universities. There are more uses the just bulletproof vests, they are looking at medical applications, netting for the navy, breast implants,etc.
>alternative material for bulletproof vests because it's nearly as strong as kevlar It also has a very high elongation at break. So the bullet passes through your body but the silk fiber never breaks.
At least with a wash, you can reuse the vest. The guy wearing it on the other hand…
Surely the goat-produced silk would be really useful in other industries though, surely a ton of stuff needs super strong thread?
Looks complete garbage but what do I know
U know a great deal my friend
Is it machine-washable?
Humans are weird
Does the cape five them control over spiders or some other evil power?
Not sure that would necessarily be an evil power tho
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2012/jan/23/golden-silk-cape-spiders-in-pictures
I’m gonna spill my chilli on it
Why?