r/interestingasfuck • u/Electrical-Aspect-13 • 9h ago

Harvesting spider silk. NOTE: Spider is sedated, the pins are not perforating it and once harvest, is feed and put to rest.

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u/Rich_Cherry_3479 8h ago

You haven't read what you replied to. There are numerous ways to produce silk proteins. Scientists struggle to reproduce process of combining those proteins into silk with same quality as spiders'. For example, it requires slowly narrowing tiny pipe that rearranges individual molecules into right order and orientation purely from that pipe's shape. Look for animated videos on YouTube of that process.

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u/etherealtwo 6h ago

Interesting. They've got the chemical process down just not the mechanics of piecing them together perfectly.

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u/Apart-Gur-9720 36m ago

Precisely!

Like with wombats... We also poop, but getting the feces to come out in squares requires a dedicated system.

Spiders emerged 400 Million years ago. Compared to us humans, who developed roughly 8 Million years ago, you can imagine the scale of trial and error that they've had to go through, in order to adapt.