A spider that spins "golden threads" lives in Madagascar (7 photos)

The Madagascar Nephila creates a web whose yellow threads shine like gold in the sunlight. A square meter of fabric made from this unique web is valued at $500,000.





Come to work as a weaver! A friendly team awaits you!

Eight-legged, poisonous, scary... Spiders are usually associated with something unpleasant, dangerous. Who would have known that the Madagascar Nephila would create a golden web, which is prayed for by all fashion designers and the richest fashionistas of all countries!

Once upon a time in Madagascar there lived a hard-working couple, their names were Simon Pierce and Nicholas Godley. They made bags until they got tired of it. And in the same Madagascar lived the orb-weaver spider Nephila. The stars aligned in such a way that the paths of people and the spider converged. So the fashion designers tried a new craft: weaving fabric from Nephila threads.

It must be said that you can’t call them innovators in the full sense of the word. Spinning threads from spider webs was tried in ancient China. And on the coast of the Indian Ocean, fishermen still have fun with this: they roll the Nephila web into a ball and throw it into the water. In the water, the ball unfolds, and fish get entangled in the nets. Here you have gold threads instead of goldfish. And it is still unknown which is more expensive. The fabric is indeed gold in color. And it is stronger than steel thread of the same thickness.



One web can withstand a load of 80 grams.

It was these qualities of the nephila thread that attracted Pierce and Godley. They collected the material for their work for several years. It is not surprising: to get 28 grams of such yarn, you need to pick 23,000 spiders. And this was a larger scale. It took several more years to weave an entire cape dress with the help of local craftsmen.





This is a nightmare factory, not a thread factory!

For this, 19th century recipes were used: spider silk was once used for the garments of the rulers of Madagascar. Among the methods for collecting the thread, there is a truly jewelry-like one: the spider is placed in a separate box and the precious material is carefully pulled out.



The fabric was decorated with themed embroidery — spiders and geometric shapes that resemble a spider web.

Finally, in 2012, the result of the labor of eighty people and about one and a half million spiders was presented in London, in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The resulting dress weighed about a kilogram. The product was not only elastic and luxuriously golden, but also rare in strength. Such that now manufacturers of bulletproof vests are looking at the nephila with interest.



This is the beauty that resulted.

But you can't dream of walking down the red carpet in a gold dress or at least showing up on the beach in a bulletproof bikini. The material is valued at 500 thousand dollars per square meter. And the Nephila are not going to make life easier for fashionistas. The eight-legged queens of glamor know their worth: they have high demands on the conditions of their detention and are not going to easily reproduce in captivity. If they are not satisfied with the changes in temperature and humidity, you will not get offspring.



In addition, among the Nephila, as is often the case with spiders, cannibalism is popular. Their males are incomparably smaller than the females, and a beautiful Nephila can inadvertently send her gentleman into her mouth instead of some bug. The same problems arise when keeping only females. Each one needs at least a meter of free space. And try to create a dormitory for a whole factory of such weavers. Settle the spiders together, and the hungry ladies will deal with the competitors even faster than with the suitors. Moreover, they have more protein.



Lunch break at a Madagascar factory.

It must be said that the nephila dines in full accordance with the rules of high society: properly serving the catch. It instantly weaves a web around the caught victim, hangs it by a loop on its leg, climbs to a place of honor in the center of the web, turns belly up, and only then begins to devour the resulting shawarma with appetite. But all this beauty is for itself, beloved, and not for mass production!