The dark side of how silk is actually made

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Originally published at: The dark side of how silk is actually made | Boing Boing

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It’s darkly funny to me how most “how it’s made” videos about silk would tastefully gloss over the “pupaes are boiled alive” part.

But yeah, if you want an unbroken strand of silk from the cocoon, that’s the only way. And it’s how it’s been done for, literally, thousands of years.

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It’s made of people, isn’t it?

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That’s the part that blows my mind. Who worked out the steps, and how? The path from “leaves + worms” to “silk thread” looks pretty non-intuitive to me.

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Is there a light side?

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I suspect that I don’t even know how much I don’t know about all the various process optimizations (plus, of course, the significant selective breeding of the moths) it takes to get a product in quality and quantity to be worth the trouble; but the introductory realization that there’s fiber to be had doesn’t seem so bad:

Even the wild-type cocoons are visibly fibrous; and you cat watch caterpillars extruding their filament to construct them as they do it, if you avoid bothering them.

What I’d be really curious to know is what caused silk worms to get the necessary ongoing interest: “technically a source of fiber” is some distance from “worth the time and trouble vs. alternatives”. Are the results surprisingly good, just scarce, even when it’s someone using improvisational salvage attempts against scavenged wild cocoons that have already been chewed open? Was the area particularly unpromising in terms of other fiber candidates? There are a decent number of fiber crops out there, plus shaveable animals, so it wouldn’t be a given that, just because it’s recognized as possible, it would be recognized as worth doing; and it presumably wouldn’t have reached the level of a high performance luxury material without a significant amount of effort being put into inferior early versions.

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Nobody has told the silkworms that their chance at membership in the Most Noble Order of the Garter is…on a different basis…than that of the order of chivalry of the same name.

It keeps their squirmy little sprits up.

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Came here for Being Boiled. Not disappointed.

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