Spider Silk

 A bout of cleaning in December had me consider the spider and the bad press it can have.  Today I’d like to focus more on the web itself. Incidentally, isn’t it strange that what we clean away we call ‘cobwebs’ and is considered kind of creepy and dirty? However, in terms of etymology, the spider web and cobweb are the same: the word ‘coppe’ being an ancient Dutch word for ‘spider’.

                                    

Originally the spider produced silk to protect its own body and its eggs – below you can see a cocoon containing the eggs which are covered by the sticky silk. Then things progressed and silk became a hunting device.                                             

    

In fact, spiders can produce different types of silk: non-sticky for construction purposes, sticky for trapping prey and a finer silk for wrapping it up. Below we see a hapless victim, this time in a non-protective cocoon!                                         

The spider’s padded feet and hairy legs cleverly stop it getting entangled in its own trap.

This all seems to be very efficient, but you can imagine how much of the spider’s energy and protein stores are used up in silk production. In addition, the hunting web has a shelf life as in time it loses its stickiness and, thus, its efficiency in entrapment. To offset these disadvantages, the spider will eat its own web on a daily basis, thereby recycling these proteins!  

The properties of this fine thread have long been admired. In terms of its strength, each fibre, a thousand times thinner than a strand of human hair, is made of thousands of nanostrands. Yet, this substance has more tensile strength than the same weight of steel and is also more elastic.

  The diagram below demonstrates how man learns from and copies its structural design.

                                  

 But its healing properties have also been acknowledged since ancient times.

Greeks and Romans are known to have used spider webs to treat soldiers’ wounds. They would first clean wounds with honey and vinegar, and then cover them with balled-up spider web. Now we know that it is rich in vitamin K, a powerful coagulant.

The medicinal use of spider webs inspired scientists in England to create synthetic silk, which could potentially be used in dressings to treat diabetic wounds, thanks to its antibiotic qualities. Researchers are also studying how spider silk can help treat burns. Other medicinal uses of such synthetic proteins are in the production for dressings and surgical sutures.                                   

Nor does it require a stretch of the imagination to appreciate where the concept of the world wide web originated from. How else could I communicate my thoughts to you out there?