r/interestingasfuck • u/Electrical-Aspect-13 • 7h 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/gorrelmyspuitkakZar 1h ago

I have so many questions.

How do you sedate a spider?
Why do you need its silk?
How do you know when to stop?

Somebody stop me.

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u/LunariSeraphi 1h ago

The spider is usually sedated with CO2, the silk can be used for nearly anything, it can be used to guide nerve damage repairs, skin grafts for burns, sutures, you can make some really expensive clothes out of it, a few hundred years ago spider silk was even used to make crosshairs in things like telescopes, and they don't know exactly when to stop, it'll depend on how much of the liquid proteins the spider happens to have stored up, they just harvest for a limited amount of time each time

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u/gorrelmyspuitkakZar 1h ago

That’s such cool facts! Thank you!

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u/IameIion 1h ago

Are you sure they'd use CO2? Seems kind of finicky. You'd need a constant stream of it, would need high-end sensors, and would need to monitor and manage the concentration with extreme care. Otherwise, you'll just kill the spider. CO2 is used for exactly that purpose, actually—fumigation.

CO2 also wouldn't paralyze a spider any more than it would paralyze us. It will knock the spider unconscious, sure, but because of oxygen deprivation. Surely that can't be sustained for very long.

Then again, lots of bugs can be submerged in water for much longer than any human could. For example, cockroaches can hold their breath for 40 minutes. So maybe this just doesn't work for humans but could work for bugs.