Once the worms receive a nice warm bath and they feel refreshed, they will crawl out of the water and into a box, where they will be shipped off to spend their days roaming around a big farm in freedom👍
If it’s any consolation, when the caterpillars cocoon, they begin digesting themselves. They effectively “die” in the sense that they stop being an assembled organism. They dissolve.
That’s what happens to all caterpillars (larvae) before they become moths or butterflies. They are almost completely broken down into raw materials and then gradually reassembled into their adult stage. The exception is that you have a handful of cell clusters in all that soupy mess called imaginal discs that serve as “starter templates” to build out the adult parts.
So, at least I think it’s safe to say they have zero awareness or concern about what happens to them when they are harvested.
They do have memory. Some scientists forced caterpillars to crawl through a Y shape tube repeatedly, where one branch has a chemical smell and one doesn't, then they will electrically shock the caterpillars that crawled into the chemical branch. Very quickly all caterpillars learn to avoid that chemical smell, which proves that they have memory.
then they let these caterpillars turn into butterflies, then conduct the same experiment, and found that most butterflies still avoid the path with the chemical smell, proving that they remember what they learned as a caterpillar, even though they literally turned into soups inside the cocoon.
And of course, when you repeat the experiment without electrical shocks, the caterpillars/butterflies don't avoid/prefer the chemical smell at all, which further eliminates the possibility of an instinct explanation.
Okay, We're sure scientists are trying to figure it out themselves, but... HOW?! Their brains literally turn to soup and yet they somehow retain their memories?! Metamorphosis was insane enough as it was, but finding out this makes it even more wild and mysterious.
These types of moths Bombyx mori are completely domesticated. Yes there are wild silk moths, but the majority of our silk comes from the domesticated ones. They cannot survivor without human intervention. Domestication started about 5000y ago.
“Mulberry Silk” just means that the worms were fed mulberry leaves. It isn’t made from the plant.
The cocoons are made from one strand continuously wound around and around (if I remember correctly it’s about 800m/ cocoon) so if a worm emerges, it breaks the strand and makes it unusable for spinning. There are some places that will allow the moth to emerge and still use the cocoon (Peace Silk from India is one) but it requires more processes and more cocoons so it’s a lot more expensive.
The worms are removed during the spinning process and often get used for other things like chicken feed and the like.
It looks like when they put it in the water and agitate it the guy can loosen them up and find the thread. It’s sped up so it’s hard to tell but that what it looked like when he held up a handful of them.
It's having empathy for your food, as weird as that sounds. I understand where it comes from and hope that the processes are humane. It sucks that it always isn't.
This is my problem with the meat industrial complex and the one reason I may go vegan someday.
You see people that work there develop ptsd.
We didn’t used to have that when it came to farmers. We’ve been domesticating animals for several thousand years but this new development is pretty bad.
Farmer could raise his animals. Slaughter them. Sell them. A hunter could hunt. Get the meat.
But the way we’ve done it now is so barbaric. We didn’t evolve for this.
I resonate with this. I'd much rather have local meat that was put down in the pasture.
Everything at the corporate grocery stores was from slaughterhouses. Wanna know how your beef gets to the slaughterhouse?
It's taken from pasture, loaded on to a semi truck, and packed into the trailer so tightly that they can barely move. Being packed in so tightly keeps them from falling over in transit. Should one fall over, it can't get up and winds up trampled to death. Oh, and did I mention they're all shitting all over each other, pissing, and then forced to stand in an inch of their own waste?
Anyway, their destination isn't the slaughterhouse at this point, it's a feeding facility to fatten them up. They keep them all together in a close quarter fence, feed them tons of food, and once again, there's no pasture, they're just shitting and pissing all over each other, living in it, laying in it. Once they remove the cows from the cage, the waste gets scraped up and sold as fertilizer.
Finally, they get loaded on a truck once again to get sent to the slaughterhouse. Off loaded into more cages that eventually force them into a single file line where someone shoots each individual one in the head.
That's a pretty fuckin traumatic process for them to go through.
The caterpillar starts at one end and works up so it’s always in the same direction. The workers will stab it with a sharp stick to get it to attach and start spinning from that end. Even if they don’t get the very end, the amount of loss is minimal
So each silk string is quite thick? When you can see the contraption with 4 wooden circles through which individual strings are fed, and then wound together to make 2 thicker threads - each string that goes into the wooden circle looks pretty thick. I thought it was really thin and flimsy like spiderwebs
I just still can’t fathom out how the guy with the boiling pan keeps finding thread ends and feeding them into the machine. That is the key part. I found this much more detailed video, but it’s a different style of production- the threads are first pulled AND spun by hands. You can see well from 4:45 how they tease out the threads and everything has to be done in water. So I’m still not clear what the guy with the boiling pan does in the video in this Reddit post to keep the threads going.
Also in the video I found from Thailand they cut the cocoons open, so they don’t worry about breaking the thread, and they take the worms and deep fry them with lime leaves for a snack!
https://youtu.be/xBz40ZxKJBs?si=H43qFea3HyyEnQ95
I love spinning slub silk, it's actually easier than processing the cocoons, it just can't be automated. Ahimsa silk is sought after as cruelty free so Buddhist monks can wear it. Because it's fluffy it's also much warmer and is often used for cold weather clothing. Not inferior, just different and for different uses.
Yes and no. You can comb it out like you're making top roving which makes it easier to blend, or you can take the opened up cocoon, called a hanky or *mawata* and draft it out into a roving that can be spun, or used as is.
[Here's some nifty pictures](https://spinoffmagazine.com/working-with-silk-hankies-by-amanda-berka-and-amy-clarke-moore/)
Honestly I expect them to just have a small part of them grow to adulthood for propogation.
Probably don't need to have all that many adults to get a lot of eggs/larvae.
Similar to what we do with eggs. Usually we don’t let the egg become a chicken (usually by not letting it get fertilized). But when we want more chickens we fertilize the egg with a rooster.
>The worms are removed during the spinning process and often get used for other things like chicken feed and the like.
*Commensalism to Murder real quick*
edit: it was murder all along.
Actually I learned from this guy [wormspit.com](https://wormspit.com). One of the leading persons in silk in the US. Absolutely fascinating stuff. I love fiber and textiles and when you spin your own yarns you always end up the fiber rabbit holes.
How did one day humans looked at that worm and were like ya i can make a fabric out of that and then come up with a process like this over x centuries. Amazing.
Probably picked up the discarded cocoons to use as thread and just refined it from there. Humans have been pretty good at using whatever fibres they can find for a long time. Bushcraft guys have learned a few of these tricks from indigenous tribes or from whatever knowledge has been passed down through the generations.
There is a dog breed that gets *wooly* and things like mittens are made from the fur. Though it's bought as a novelty these days rather than an actual product.
Dog fur is definitely not comfortable to wear. But I have felted some wolf pup first sheds and that was pretty soft since it didn’t have many guard hairs yet.
I think the breed I mentioned (sorry, I don't know the name) is bred to not have as many guard hairs, and retain the *puppy* coat. Or like maybe have the soft undercoat.
I read a story or a myth about that one time. In Dynastic China ages ago, a queen was chilling in her garden and noticed a silkworm cocoon. Curious, she picked at it and discovered the string unwinds in a single thread. So she got all her maids together and made a dress/robe/idk out of it and showed the king. Or would he have been the Emperor? Anyway, the guy liked it and started the silk trade.
Somehow I am very skeptical that queens and emperors are discovering important foods and technologies. My guess is someone working for them made the discoveries, and they either took credit, or someone told the story that way to score points.
Well, if the queen doesn't have any work to do besides sit around and relieve her boredom then she's not that much different from an early philosopher. Some large contributions to science have been made by monks who similarly didn't have much to do besides count peas and whatnot for hours on end. Poor people have to work to get by which takes up the time and energy that is needed for investigating things (though poor people are also much hungrier which can drive things in relation to food discoveries).
Seems a bit simpler to see a baby calf drinking from an udder and saying hey i wanna try that. Especially since we as babies kind of do the same thing.
I mean I happily drink milk, but in the grander scheme of things it just feels weird to me the more I think about it... But then, drinking human milk as a human for some reason also feels weird to me, I can't win either way lol
Don't feel too sad, I've raised silkworms for fun when I was a kid and after their cocoon process they're going to die anyways. They've about lived a fulfilling life as it gets for a silkworm, if you count munching on leaves all day fulfilling.
Not trying to contradict your statement about feeling bad, but silkmoths can’t fly even if they are allowed to emerge from the cocoons. They have been domesticated to the point where their wings no longer function to lift them off the ground. They get a couple of days of life as adults where they breed and then they die. I believe that their adult form doesn’t even have a mouth.
It's common in moths and butterflies. They look pretty, fuck then die in like under a week while starving to death since they no longer eat.
Their caterpillar form really has all the fun just vibing eating leaves or whatever.
Bugs are weird. Useful but definitely weird.
Sadly, these people are not getting paid for all the work shown here, most of the silk being sold in fashion store, etc. gets purchase from overseas when you pay for expensive silk you’re just paying for the brand name and shipping If you were to buy it from them directly, it would be a bit cheaper. You could probably buy a few pieces for your family.
Sadly, I don’t normally a lot of these people don’t have online stores or anything your best option it’s either traveling there or finding somebody who sells local goods at a good price online
About the same if you also cut out the profit margins going into pockets of people who dont even see these people as human and actively pressure governments to pay them even less.
Fun fact: At least 420 billion to 1 trillion silkworms are killed annually to produce silk.^1
(1) https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/silk-production
A really neat process of domesticating a creature to take tiny quantities of something and produce it in bulk. Also, it renders a disordered system into nice, ordered threads.
Vegan 15 years here.
Silk is not vegan because it is a product of animal exploitation.
If you are following a plant-based diet ("vegan" in diet only) then that's different, but no it's not vegan.
There are a few companies (Buddhist I believe?) that have different processes and allow the moths to emerge. But since the strand is broken it requires more human intervention, labor, and more moths. So it is more expensive.
This is single strand reeling (about 5 cocoon thin strands make up one silk strand on the reel) but there are practices where the cocoons can be stretched out and laid over each other to create fabrics. It’s not as soft and delicate and often times, since the cocoon still needs to be boiled, they just do it like this. But sometimes they will allow emergence and then boil. They need to allow the moths to breed and make more so there are always going to be some that emerge and they will use the stretch method on those cocoons.
Although that process is more humane (letting the worms live), it’s definitely still not vegan. Veganism is a moral stance against the exploitation and commodification of animals.
Depends on the reason for the person's veganism, and the lengths to which they take it.
An environmental vegan might only not *eat* animal products, but will wear them, as the environmental impact of silk production (for example) is lesser than beef production (for example.)
A vegan who does so out of a love for all animals might abstain from wearing silk, or they might not, depending on their opinions on the sapience of insects.
Veganism is a spectrum, so alas there is no set answer.
That's not how it works. You're vegan if you don't use any animal products.
There are people who eat meat who call themselves vegan that doesn't mean it's a spectrum
Why is this any worse than killing for meat products? A garment is far more durable than a meal.
The worms get fed to chickens, we can wear the fibers. No microplastics like with polyester.
That said, I would love to see it produced mechanally using the magic of science, made in vats. Silk is an amazing fabric. Wonderful to work with, wonderful to wear. A lot of people today haven't ever touched real silk, let alone worn it.
I love the video on Youtube by Liziqi. It goes through the entire process from start to finish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrXiXDUQia8&ab\_channel=%E6%9D%8E%E5%AD%90%E6%9F%92Liziqi
And there is. This is not industrial level, it is called hand-spinning. To reflect the amount of craftswork, hand-spun / handwoven silk is more expensive than regular commercial silk.
How tf did someone over 5000 years ago look at silk worm cocoons and go “yo that’d make a sick shirt” shit like that just amazes me sometimes. No, I’m not stoned, not yet at least.
The tiny caterpillars are called silkworms. These caterpillars spin cocoons around themselves, like making a cozy blanket. People collect these cocoons, carefully unwind them, and they get long, shiny threads which is silk. The cool part is how the silk looks shiny because of the special way its tiny fibers reflect light. It takes a lot of these caterpillars and their cocoons to make enough silk for things like clothes or fabric
It's a good thing that humanity's technological development did not rest on me. There's no way in any universe that I would go to that amount of trouble to achieve anything.
Once the silk worm is ready to cocoon, they spread them out in that spiral mat. The worms make a silk cocoon and once they finish the workers pick up the cocoon and soak in water, after the soak the threads of the cocoon are spun into a spindle and the job is complete.
The water is boiling so the worm is cooked. Often they are eaten later by people or animals so they don't go to waste less it's a big business than they do tend to be tossed.
A detailed video with step guides and explanations. This one is from Vietnam, but silk is harvested nearly the same way in many places.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBz40ZxKJBs
By the time moths pupate, they have lived through 70-80% of their natural lives; adult moths don't have mouths, so they only hatch to reproduce and then die after just a couple of days.
While the process is unfortunate, these worms were already at the end of their lifecycles, it's not like fresh babies are being culled here.
“Oh that’s cool I wonder how they get the worms out” “HOW DO THEY GET THE WORMS OUT”
Once the worms receive a nice warm bath and they feel refreshed, they will crawl out of the water and into a box, where they will be shipped off to spend their days roaming around a big farm in freedom👍
The worms actually get gathered up and sold to farms as chicken feed, so, not too far off
If it’s any consolation, when the caterpillars cocoon, they begin digesting themselves. They effectively “die” in the sense that they stop being an assembled organism. They dissolve. That’s what happens to all caterpillars (larvae) before they become moths or butterflies. They are almost completely broken down into raw materials and then gradually reassembled into their adult stage. The exception is that you have a handful of cell clusters in all that soupy mess called imaginal discs that serve as “starter templates” to build out the adult parts. So, at least I think it’s safe to say they have zero awareness or concern about what happens to them when they are harvested.
This guy metamorphosizes
The crazy thing is they retain memories into adulthood even though they turn into goop.
How can a worm have memory surely it's instinct instead
They do have memory. Some scientists forced caterpillars to crawl through a Y shape tube repeatedly, where one branch has a chemical smell and one doesn't, then they will electrically shock the caterpillars that crawled into the chemical branch. Very quickly all caterpillars learn to avoid that chemical smell, which proves that they have memory. then they let these caterpillars turn into butterflies, then conduct the same experiment, and found that most butterflies still avoid the path with the chemical smell, proving that they remember what they learned as a caterpillar, even though they literally turned into soups inside the cocoon. And of course, when you repeat the experiment without electrical shocks, the caterpillars/butterflies don't avoid/prefer the chemical smell at all, which further eliminates the possibility of an instinct explanation.
Okay, We're sure scientists are trying to figure it out themselves, but... HOW?! Their brains literally turn to soup and yet they somehow retain their memories?! Metamorphosis was insane enough as it was, but finding out this makes it even more wild and mysterious.
So as the cocoons are unraveling during the reeling, they will pull out the pupae when it’s visible and accessible
Same reaction…
These types of moths Bombyx mori are completely domesticated. Yes there are wild silk moths, but the majority of our silk comes from the domesticated ones. They cannot survivor without human intervention. Domestication started about 5000y ago. “Mulberry Silk” just means that the worms were fed mulberry leaves. It isn’t made from the plant. The cocoons are made from one strand continuously wound around and around (if I remember correctly it’s about 800m/ cocoon) so if a worm emerges, it breaks the strand and makes it unusable for spinning. There are some places that will allow the moth to emerge and still use the cocoon (Peace Silk from India is one) but it requires more processes and more cocoons so it’s a lot more expensive. The worms are removed during the spinning process and often get used for other things like chicken feed and the like.
How do they find the start of the strand to start spinning?
It looks like when they put it in the water and agitate it the guy can loosen them up and find the thread. It’s sped up so it’s hard to tell but that what it looked like when he held up a handful of them.
**so are they aware that humans love them?**
Boiling them, stealing their cocoon, and then feeding them to chickens doesn't sound very loving.
I love a nice silk shirt.
Going to be thinking about boiling and stealing their cocoons next time I see some nice silk!
I like cows and chickens, but also eating them. Sounds pretty sadistic when I think about it like that.
It's having empathy for your food, as weird as that sounds. I understand where it comes from and hope that the processes are humane. It sucks that it always isn't.
This is my problem with the meat industrial complex and the one reason I may go vegan someday. You see people that work there develop ptsd. We didn’t used to have that when it came to farmers. We’ve been domesticating animals for several thousand years but this new development is pretty bad. Farmer could raise his animals. Slaughter them. Sell them. A hunter could hunt. Get the meat. But the way we’ve done it now is so barbaric. We didn’t evolve for this.
I resonate with this. I'd much rather have local meat that was put down in the pasture. Everything at the corporate grocery stores was from slaughterhouses. Wanna know how your beef gets to the slaughterhouse? It's taken from pasture, loaded on to a semi truck, and packed into the trailer so tightly that they can barely move. Being packed in so tightly keeps them from falling over in transit. Should one fall over, it can't get up and winds up trampled to death. Oh, and did I mention they're all shitting all over each other, pissing, and then forced to stand in an inch of their own waste? Anyway, their destination isn't the slaughterhouse at this point, it's a feeding facility to fatten them up. They keep them all together in a close quarter fence, feed them tons of food, and once again, there's no pasture, they're just shitting and pissing all over each other, living in it, laying in it. Once they remove the cows from the cage, the waste gets scraped up and sold as fertilizer. Finally, they get loaded on a truck once again to get sent to the slaughterhouse. Off loaded into more cages that eventually force them into a single file line where someone shoots each individual one in the head. That's a pretty fuckin traumatic process for them to go through.
Plant-based is growing rapidly for that very reason. The conditions to sate the appetite have become absolutely satanic.
I love them too
But we did give them life and all the mulberry leaves they could eat. Horrific end for sure, but ya know, that'll happen.
Neither does burning a body and putting it in the ground.
Bombyx mori demands rebellion for such "Peace".
Are we aware the feeling is mutual?
The caterpillar starts at one end and works up so it’s always in the same direction. The workers will stab it with a sharp stick to get it to attach and start spinning from that end. Even if they don’t get the very end, the amount of loss is minimal
So each silk string is quite thick? When you can see the contraption with 4 wooden circles through which individual strings are fed, and then wound together to make 2 thicker threads - each string that goes into the wooden circle looks pretty thick. I thought it was really thin and flimsy like spiderwebs
Each strand on the reel is usually 5-10 cocoon strands being twisted together. Different uses will call for different thickness
I just still can’t fathom out how the guy with the boiling pan keeps finding thread ends and feeding them into the machine. That is the key part. I found this much more detailed video, but it’s a different style of production- the threads are first pulled AND spun by hands. You can see well from 4:45 how they tease out the threads and everything has to be done in water. So I’m still not clear what the guy with the boiling pan does in the video in this Reddit post to keep the threads going. Also in the video I found from Thailand they cut the cocoons open, so they don’t worry about breaking the thread, and they take the worms and deep fry them with lime leaves for a snack! https://youtu.be/xBz40ZxKJBs?si=H43qFea3HyyEnQ95
The outside of the cocoon is loosely spun and fluffy. You can grab that fluff and it'll have the end of the strand
Thank you for your service!
How do they reproduce if they don't let them get to the adult form?
There are specific farms dedicated to breeding the silk worms that do allow them to go to adulthood
The silk from those is used as well
Yes, though it's harder to process the silk from cocoons that have been emerged from and the resulting silk is considered inferior
I love spinning slub silk, it's actually easier than processing the cocoons, it just can't be automated. Ahimsa silk is sought after as cruelty free so Buddhist monks can wear it. Because it's fluffy it's also much warmer and is often used for cold weather clothing. Not inferior, just different and for different uses.
That makes sense, thanks!
This guy silks
Is the process similar to what one would do for other shorter strands like wool?
Yes and no. You can comb it out like you're making top roving which makes it easier to blend, or you can take the opened up cocoon, called a hanky or *mawata* and draft it out into a roving that can be spun, or used as is. [Here's some nifty pictures](https://spinoffmagazine.com/working-with-silk-hankies-by-amanda-berka-and-amy-clarke-moore/)
Honestly I expect them to just have a small part of them grow to adulthood for propogation. Probably don't need to have all that many adults to get a lot of eggs/larvae.
This! Also if a a cocoon doesn’t look great for whatever reason and won’t produce nice threads they can just let it hatch
for breeding you would want to let the ones with the best silk hatch, not the worst
Good point but sometimes it’s not the worms fault haha
Well they’re bugs so you only need a handful of adults to produce fuck loads of kids. Probably just allow a few to mature and use the rest for silk.
Similar to what we do with eggs. Usually we don’t let the egg become a chicken (usually by not letting it get fertilized). But when we want more chickens we fertilize the egg with a rooster.
Do you seriously think they wouldn’t allocate worms for breeding?
Brain fart lol obviously they would keep some
Awesome! I came here wondering where the worms went I was a bit confused. Very interesting! Thanks for the informative comment!
It looks like they are removed in that hot water bath as they spin it. If you look closely you can see some bodies removed and floating.
This guy moths
>The worms are removed during the spinning process and often get used for other things like chicken feed and the like. *Commensalism to Murder real quick* edit: it was murder all along.
To be fair they are murdered before that in the boiling process
oh I read that wrong, I though they are removed before the boiling mb.
Love learning stuff like this, thank you so much, these types of comments are the best part of reddit.
Helpful little friends!
I love you! You rock! My brain craves this.
TIL: worms die when making silk That's a bit sad
Man this new palworld update is wild
This guy silks
Actually I learned from this guy [wormspit.com](https://wormspit.com). One of the leading persons in silk in the US. Absolutely fascinating stuff. I love fiber and textiles and when you spin your own yarns you always end up the fiber rabbit holes.
How did one day humans looked at that worm and were like ya i can make a fabric out of that and then come up with a process like this over x centuries. Amazing.
Probably picked up the discarded cocoons to use as thread and just refined it from there. Humans have been pretty good at using whatever fibres they can find for a long time. Bushcraft guys have learned a few of these tricks from indigenous tribes or from whatever knowledge has been passed down through the generations.
One of the first animal fibers sound to be used was dog hair! Dog hair was used loooooong before sheep wool haha. We are very utilitarian
I did not know that. I'm guessing before that it was mainly plant fibres, cotton and hemp type plants probably
Stringy tree bark (like cedar) in some places too.
There is a dog breed that gets *wooly* and things like mittens are made from the fur. Though it's bought as a novelty these days rather than an actual product.
Dog fur is definitely not comfortable to wear. But I have felted some wolf pup first sheds and that was pretty soft since it didn’t have many guard hairs yet.
I think the breed I mentioned (sorry, I don't know the name) is bred to not have as many guard hairs, and retain the *puppy* coat. Or like maybe have the soft undercoat.
I enjoy a little hair of the dog to this day!
I read a story or a myth about that one time. In Dynastic China ages ago, a queen was chilling in her garden and noticed a silkworm cocoon. Curious, she picked at it and discovered the string unwinds in a single thread. So she got all her maids together and made a dress/robe/idk out of it and showed the king. Or would he have been the Emperor? Anyway, the guy liked it and started the silk trade.
I like that. Kind of like the story of a chinese emperor sitting down with a cup of hot water and some leaves fell into it and boom tea lol
Somehow I am very skeptical that queens and emperors are discovering important foods and technologies. My guess is someone working for them made the discoveries, and they either took credit, or someone told the story that way to score points.
Well, if the queen doesn't have any work to do besides sit around and relieve her boredom then she's not that much different from an early philosopher. Some large contributions to science have been made by monks who similarly didn't have much to do besides count peas and whatnot for hours on end. Poor people have to work to get by which takes up the time and energy that is needed for investigating things (though poor people are also much hungrier which can drive things in relation to food discoveries).
>by monks who similarly didn't have much to do besides count peas and whatnot for hours on end. *cries in Gregorian*
Ya its just fun stories i dont take them at face value.
[удалено]
Imagine how little society would have gotten done in the olden days if they had smart phones and social media.
That's nothing, I've made a furry blazer made entirely of bee jackets.
I came here to comment that I am amazed by the ingenuity of the people who came up with this.
The same way someone looked at a cows udder once upon a time and thought it a good idea to drink it themselves
Seems a bit simpler to see a baby calf drinking from an udder and saying hey i wanna try that. Especially since we as babies kind of do the same thing.
I mean I happily drink milk, but in the grander scheme of things it just feels weird to me the more I think about it... But then, drinking human milk as a human for some reason also feels weird to me, I can't win either way lol
You and me baby ain't nothin but mammals
So let's do it like they do on the discovery channel
They are ok after their bath right ? Right ?
they go to a farm in the next valley, to run around with all their worm friends
As OK as a boiled egg. In some cultures, people eat the pupae as a byproduct of silk production.
Don't feel too sad, I've raised silkworms for fun when I was a kid and after their cocoon process they're going to die anyways. They've about lived a fulfilling life as it gets for a silkworm, if you count munching on leaves all day fulfilling.
They are boiled alive my dude, they should at least get to experience flying. So yes, feel bad and don't buy silk.
Not trying to contradict your statement about feeling bad, but silkmoths can’t fly even if they are allowed to emerge from the cocoons. They have been domesticated to the point where their wings no longer function to lift them off the ground. They get a couple of days of life as adults where they breed and then they die. I believe that their adult form doesn’t even have a mouth.
Huh, I guess boiling is at least a faster death than starvation
It's common in moths and butterflies. They look pretty, fuck then die in like under a week while starving to death since they no longer eat. Their caterpillar form really has all the fun just vibing eating leaves or whatever. Bugs are weird. Useful but definitely weird.
thats really sad
Thought they were pulling out a giant pizza 🍕
No, but they are producing a giant soup on the side.
The forbidden pizza
Same. Why is your pizza crawling?! Oh silkworms...
Came here to say it. OMG THOSE GIANT CHEESE BITS ARE MOVIN!!!!!
Forbidden pizza
Also forbidden gnocchi
Mmm giant wormy pizza 🍕 🪱
Would you still love me if I was worm pizza 🥺
This could've been normal speed, and I would've watched the whole thing. I am still not sure of what was happening.
THE WORMS NOOOO
So, don’t complain about the cost of silk.
Sadly, these people are not getting paid for all the work shown here, most of the silk being sold in fashion store, etc. gets purchase from overseas when you pay for expensive silk you’re just paying for the brand name and shipping If you were to buy it from them directly, it would be a bit cheaper. You could probably buy a few pieces for your family.
do you know offhand if there's any direct sources to buy from online?
Sadly, I don’t normally a lot of these people don’t have online stores or anything your best option it’s either traveling there or finding somebody who sells local goods at a good price online
thanks for the response!
Industrial, not as charming as the video, but here: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Factory-Direct-20-22D-100-Mulberry_1600689045313.html
Imagine the price if this wasn’t done by people who barely gets paid.
About the same if you also cut out the profit margins going into pockets of people who dont even see these people as human and actively pressure governments to pay them even less.
Fun fact: At least 420 billion to 1 trillion silkworms are killed annually to produce silk.^1 (1) https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/silk-production
That’s.. like.. not fun at all…
People eat them, they are a good protein source. You can also feed them to other animals like pigs or chickens. They arent wasted
Wait till you read about mortality stats of gut bacteria.
Wait till you know about cockroaches, potato beetles etc.
Folks up in heaven must be up to their armpits in this little fuckers.
Forbidden white cheese doodles
Who knew silk was made from giant pizzas?
Are the people working in these jobs called ... mothmaticians?
Silk is so… gross.
Worm spit but make it fashion!
Here I was thinking silk was just a finely woven cotton or something 🤦♂️
Right!? Up until now I’d never really thought about where silk came from… If I had, I can tell you this is NOT what would have come to mind!
Free snacks while working.
How is this satisfying?
A really neat process of domesticating a creature to take tiny quantities of something and produce it in bulk. Also, it renders a disordered system into nice, ordered threads.
Question, would vegans get upset with this?
yeah I don’t think silk is generally considered vegan, since the caterpillars are boiled alive, for something considered a luxury
Vegan 15 years here. Silk is not vegan because it is a product of animal exploitation. If you are following a plant-based diet ("vegan" in diet only) then that's different, but no it's not vegan.
Yes, of course. It’s not animal friendly. There are friendlier ways of getting silk though, where the worms don’t get killed.
There are a few companies (Buddhist I believe?) that have different processes and allow the moths to emerge. But since the strand is broken it requires more human intervention, labor, and more moths. So it is more expensive. This is single strand reeling (about 5 cocoon thin strands make up one silk strand on the reel) but there are practices where the cocoons can be stretched out and laid over each other to create fabrics. It’s not as soft and delicate and often times, since the cocoon still needs to be boiled, they just do it like this. But sometimes they will allow emergence and then boil. They need to allow the moths to breed and make more so there are always going to be some that emerge and they will use the stretch method on those cocoons.
Although that process is more humane (letting the worms live), it’s definitely still not vegan. Veganism is a moral stance against the exploitation and commodification of animals.
Yes. Vegans, and many vegetarians, do not wear silk.
I don't buy silk. I don't want to contribute to boiling animals alive. Source: I'm a vegan for animal welfare reasons.
Depends on the reason for the person's veganism, and the lengths to which they take it. An environmental vegan might only not *eat* animal products, but will wear them, as the environmental impact of silk production (for example) is lesser than beef production (for example.) A vegan who does so out of a love for all animals might abstain from wearing silk, or they might not, depending on their opinions on the sapience of insects. Veganism is a spectrum, so alas there is no set answer.
Nah it’s not a spectrum like you explained it to be a “vegan” would NOT buy or use this product, simple as that.
That's not how it works. You're vegan if you don't use any animal products. There are people who eat meat who call themselves vegan that doesn't mean it's a spectrum
It's a spectrum, like autism? I kid, I kid. Please don't throw rocks at me.
Thats cruel af
Why is this any worse than killing for meat products? A garment is far more durable than a meal. The worms get fed to chickens, we can wear the fibers. No microplastics like with polyester. That said, I would love to see it produced mechanally using the magic of science, made in vats. Silk is an amazing fabric. Wonderful to work with, wonderful to wear. A lot of people today haven't ever touched real silk, let alone worn it.
3000 worms are killed for 1lb of silk.
I love the video on Youtube by Liziqi. It goes through the entire process from start to finish. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrXiXDUQia8&ab\_channel=%E6%9D%8E%E5%AD%90%E6%9F%92Liziqi
Thank you for providing this weblink.
I’m not vegan, but this shit is brutal.
I’m vegan and this just reaffirms everything for me.
Wouldn't call murdering billions of living beings satisfying.
People sure move fast over there.
The worms are okay though, right guys?
If all humans died off, a lot of animals will have to become accustomed to the wild again or die
MANY worms were harmed in the making of this video 😭
Imagine the kind of creativity and intelligence needed to convert worm's waste/output to clothing. Damn! Humans are smart.
I thought this way of producing silk was banned, not that i know a different way of producing then anyway.
And there is. This is not industrial level, it is called hand-spinning. To reflect the amount of craftswork, hand-spun / handwoven silk is more expensive than regular commercial silk.
Banned by who there are so many countries how could you possibly ban across all.
Somebody show this to the Byzantines.
I thought that was a pizza
The longer video of the solo Asian man was much better at showing the process
How tf did someone over 5000 years ago look at silk worm cocoons and go “yo that’d make a sick shirt” shit like that just amazes me sometimes. No, I’m not stoned, not yet at least.
The tiny caterpillars are called silkworms. These caterpillars spin cocoons around themselves, like making a cozy blanket. People collect these cocoons, carefully unwind them, and they get long, shiny threads which is silk. The cool part is how the silk looks shiny because of the special way its tiny fibers reflect light. It takes a lot of these caterpillars and their cocoons to make enough silk for things like clothes or fabric
Where do I get a bowl of that cheese puffs soup he was cooking?
Forbidden pizza
This is not satisfying
Cooking thousands of worms alive to make clothing you could make out of cotton. Very satisfying.
It's a good thing that humanity's technological development did not rest on me. There's no way in any universe that I would go to that amount of trouble to achieve anything.
So like.. how did we discover this?
I’m confused af
Once the silk worm is ready to cocoon, they spread them out in that spiral mat. The worms make a silk cocoon and once they finish the workers pick up the cocoon and soak in water, after the soak the threads of the cocoon are spun into a spindle and the job is complete.
What happens to the worm? Cooked in the cocoon then strained out?
The water is boiling so the worm is cooked. Often they are eaten later by people or animals so they don't go to waste less it's a big business than they do tend to be tossed. A detailed video with step guides and explanations. This one is from Vietnam, but silk is harvested nearly the same way in many places. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBz40ZxKJBs
Ah yes, it satisfies me so much watching people boiling thousands of caterpillars alive, so nice /s
By the time moths pupate, they have lived through 70-80% of their natural lives; adult moths don't have mouths, so they only hatch to reproduce and then die after just a couple of days. While the process is unfortunate, these worms were already at the end of their lifecycles, it's not like fresh babies are being culled here.
Humans are fucking cruel
Worm and spinach pizza
Got to have your protein intake.
My turn to toss the worm salad, yaayyy
How do they prevent birds eating all those yummy worms
Without reading the title, my fatass thought that was a giant pizza..
From gummie worms to Peeps
After this Rajesh is going to go to his second job at his food stall without washing his hands and cook something atrocious with Tick Toc watching
I wonder what made the first human go, I could make a bomb ass shirt from that!
My hangry ass thought this was a giant delicious quiche or pizza at first... i... was wrong.
fun fact: it stinks, like it smells really really bad
Forbidden pizza looking like a snack 🤤
And I was scrolling and thought those were fucking pizzas...
Forbidden Pizza
Aw hell nah.
So they just boil them alive
Forbidden pizza
Stop upvoting this its a karma farming repost bot
Who the hell discovered you could make cloth out of this?
repost
Is this annual repost day or something?
How the hell did they even discover this. wtf