SpiderHugger

Will these startups have legs?

No matter how you spin it, turning spider silk into a product is tough. For thousands of years people have understood that it has certain qualities humans can put to use, mostly based on how amazingly strong and light and tough it is. But nobody has ever created or engineered spider silk on a commercial scale, even in an age where technology blossoms as never before.

A fun book, aimed at younger readers, explores the quest to commercialize spider silk. Lots of cute goat pictures and modest Canadian optimism, eh.

Remember the goats? They’re still around, but the effort to cash in on “spider goats” is moribund, despite what Al Gore said at SXSW just a few months ago. Feta is easy, fiber is hard.

The simpler, lower-tech method of wrangling spiders—patiently unspooling them by hand, like so many little bobbins—is never going to go big. There’s just too much effort for too little product. And they kinda bite. I’d say the livestock were also too small, but that’s never seemed to inhibit the silkworm industry. No, the problem is output.

Then there’s Spiber, a name so goofy it’s being used twice: once by a Swedish research company and again by a Japanese startup. A contraction of “spider” and “fiber,” I’m sure, but I’d call myself Spfiber instead, or SPiB (pronounced “spibe”), or I don’t know. As long as a name’s going to sound wacky, go the whole wack. Both have cool futuristic websites, though the Japanese company has more of the coveted Steve Jobs “my future is your future, plus lots of white space” look.

Spiber of Japan is surging ahead in the business press because it says it’s almost ready to produce for real. It can already cook up a kilogram of spider silk protein a day, so the company says, which if I read right equals 29 million feet of synthetic silk thread. It hopes to produce far more as soon as 2015. The process uses “microbial fermentation,” which is rather elegantly vague. Both companies in fact hijack a bacterium, the notorious E. coli, to synthesize the protein that’s the basis of their silk.

QMONOS my house: This shimmering blue number is billed as the first garment ever made entirely from artificial spider silk. QMONOS is a shouty version of kumonosu, Japanese for spider web (“Here at Spiber, the only thing missing is ‘U’!”)

What to do with oceans of artificial cobwebs? The Japanese are talking lightweight car parts and have linked up with Kojima Industries, a Toyota partner. Both outfits mention medical technology such as scaffolds for culturing tissues, wound healing, and bone repair.

These products are apparently made without the need for the second part of the spider’s magical apparatus, the spinneret. Those little aimable, controllable spigots are how a spider takes liquid silk and tugs it into the miraculous chain of proteins. The lack of such a mechanical device has been the downfall of other spider-silk ventures in the past. The Spibers are cagey about how they get around this problem.

Have the Spibers got what it takes? A dorky name is only half the battle, even for true beliebers. Wait and see.

Table for one, please

If you ponder the question of why female spiders frequently eat their mates (frequently, not always) you sometimes arrive at the question, “Why not?” They’re usually solitary creatures, those spiders, with nothing to say to each other, no shared hobbies or interests, and they refuse to stay together for the children. In fact, sometimes they eat the children, but that’s another story.

A spider man that tumbles into a female spider’s embrace is likely to be smaller than she (easier to overpower), eager to get perilously close to her fangs, and a nice packet of nutrition for the future mother to be. All of which makes great sense … for her. But is a fella more than just a snack?

It turns out to be rather more mysterious. And I like mysterious spiders. A new study of wolf spiders in China (Pardosa pseudoannulata) tried to tease out the matter of who eats whom, how often, and under what circumstances. Was she just hungry? Was the luckless suitor too inexperienced? The scientists paired off dozens of spiders, both virgin and experienced, and tabulated a number of different ways the blind dates turned out.

I am Pardosa, hear me roar. Where’s that bum that promised me dinner?

Ten percent of the virgin females ate their dates without even mating. Twenty-eight percent ate them right after mating. Both hungry gals (as opposed to recently fed) and those who had previously mated or laid egg sacs were more aggressive than the debutantes. The bigger the size differential (dimorphism) the more likely the male would become a meal. Nobody got eaten during the act itself. All very gothic and kind of comprehensible.

At this point, do the numbers … most of the males therefore got away. That’s interesting in its own right. More interesting is what follows.

There turned out to be a clear result from all these enchanted encounters: the females that had noshed on a male after mating had the same number of offspring as those who hadn’t (in other words, fecundity was unaffected) but those offspring survived better. They were vigorous spiderlings who looked to have a better shot at making it to adulthood. That rings the Darwinian gong in the clearest possible way: cannibalizing a mate gives your progeny, your genes, a leg up—eight legs up—in the grand contest with no finish line.

I have to chide the Economist, which otherwise I honor and adore, for reporting on this phenomenon with a lack of journalistic objectivity. It’s so hard for the Brits to think straight about spiders. The male “thus probably … wants to be eaten, for the good of his posterity,” writes Reggie or Nigel. And the salmon swims upstream to spawn because he wants to star in a Discovery Channel documentary, right?

Of course not. Spiders and salmon don’t want anything of the kind. Nor do they set up IRAs and college accounts for their offspring. If daddy long-legs’ death contributes to the hardiness of baby long-legs, than it’s going to happen. You don’t need God or Dr. Spock to coax it along. We packets of DNA do things like that because our ancestors, having done them, thrust their genes into the future, our present. And we will continue doing the things that work, because they have worked.

A remaining question, in the Mystery of the Dined-On Daddy, is what exactly his little carcass does for his mate and her egg sac. Nobody knows what the secret ingredient is, if there is one. Maybe the least romantic females were already equipped to make better offspring, so the male just managed to get a bad spin on the Wheel of Life even as his genes hit the jackpot.

At any rate, dude probably should have learned to dance.