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Oh hey, it's that bottle of mustard you don't even remember buying, but you've moved with twice now Alli Ward, Oh we're walking into spider webs for smologies. Here's the deal. Smologies are shorter, edited to be kid friendly and classroom safe versions of our original episodes. So if you're not with kids, you can go ahead and have the full version. It's linked in the show notes. But hey, if you're looking for something shorter and less swarrier, you've come to
the right place. Okay, here we go spider webs. Okay, I just want to say, if you're listening you're not a huge fan of spiders, I want to tell you that you're brave. I'm proud of you. And spoiler alert, this is not scary at all. We barely even talk about spiders themselves, but rather we just kind of focus on things that come out of their rears. So for anyone in your life who's a spiderfobe, just gently maybe
send them this episode. Tell them it's a great way to admire the critters, and there are very few goosebumps in the road ahead. So one day we're going to work up to arachnology. We're going to talk about the animals themselves one day. But today is not that day, my friends. So today we're just walking into spider webs. Okay, spidronology. What in the dark, shadowy night is that. So unless you are a spider doctor, you probably did not know that there is a word for spider webs, and it's
spid droins. Well, spid drowins are the main proteins in spider silk, and they're as strong as steel, but they're more flexible and they're similar to collagen or carrotin. We're going to get into it. So, yes, kiddos, this is a whole episode unraveling the mysteries and looking into the future of spider silk. What it is, how it works,
how it may change all of our lives. So stick around to get a lifetime's worth of appreciation and context about what a spider web is, what is made of, how strong a single thread can be, how it's synthesized and labs future medical uses. Some superhero flimplam, transgenic goats, jeene splicing, and the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. With Utah State Biology Professor and your new favorite spidronologist, doctor Randy lewisgious algy.
Alogyng coolbeens.
So if you could tell me your first and last name and how you pronounce it, Randy Lewis, Doctor Randy Lewis, Doctor Randy Lewis, walk me through a little bit about what is spider silk because I know enough about a spider butt to know that different things comes out of their silk glands. Yes, what's going on?
So the spiders that we work with make six different kinds of silk in a gloom. They're the ones that make the typical round web. It's called an orb web that most people think about that spiders may okay.
Side note, if you're wondering what invisible force has captured your face, what gossamer thready creation has veiled you at night, those are likely the work of orb weaver spiders. They are architects and artisans. They are craft spiders. Their talent is innate, and their spiral spider webs are just iconic. Now, Some like the Nephela golden orb weavers spin this brilliant yellow silk. It just glimmers. It's like threads of gold.
So what's up with cobwebs. Well, spider web tends to mean one that is still inhabited, and cobwebs refer to old, abandoned ones, so once they get dusty, they tend to lose their tack. But a cobweb is also a type of web, one that's less of a two planed spiral net more of a three dimensional maze. We'll get into that.
And they use the silks for very different purposes and they have very different mechanical properties, so you know, evolutionarily, you sort of have a lot of evolutionary tinkering that went on before we ever got to take a look at it. So basically, in most of the glands, there's a couple of them that they don't produce silk all the time, but generally they produce silk, put it in
a gland. They have it in a form that's still not completely identified, but we think they're sort of very small little balls of protein that are present in there. Then when they pull the silk out, so they pull it out like flaws. They don't squeeze it out like toothpaste. Okay, so all of the silks have to be pulled out.
And when they pull that the silk at the very end of a tube going down from the gland that they make it to the outside, all the silk then behind it starts to get pulled out because it's very viscous. On the trip down that tube, the sheer forces cause the protein molecules to basically line up. Like you can imagine if you were to take spaghetti start getting it down through a funnel. All the spaghetti has to line up where it doesn't go down. Now I'm hungry, So
that's what's happening in this trip down there. When they do that, they actually protein molecules lock together and become insoluble, and that's how the fiber forms. Amazingly enough, it can happen in as little as ten milliseconds. So if you see a spider fall, that silk is solidifying in milliseconds as it comes out of the spider.
And do they use a combination of their spinnerets or their legs or gravity what gives it that force? All of the above.
So they can't squeeze it out, so they either have to pull it out with their leg. The other thing they can do is attach it to something and walk away from it. Okay, So the silk that most people are interested in called dragline silk, and it's dragline because when they walk away, they drag it behind them.
Ok So, if you.
See a spider crawling across the ceiling, for instance, if you watch it, it'll crawl for a little ways and then it'll start wiggling its butt. We can't stop talking about it when it does that. It's using another silk to attach the major silk to some kind of a protrusion on the wall. So just like a climber. You know, if a climber climbs so far that they put a piton or a hook or something in there, it's exactly what spiders have been doing for four hundred million years.
So so rock climbers are a little behind on the And in addition, they can stick the silk to almost anything. Now they have trouble with something like teflon, but they can stick it to glass wonderfully. So you know, you put them in a glass aquarium, for instance, or a plexiglass aquarium, and you can see the little attachments where they put all the silk down. That is how they produce the silk and have to pull it out.
And what are some other types of silk because you said six, okay, so real quick. They've got major ambulate or dragline silk, one that is just super strong. It's as strong as steel, but it's tougher and it acts as those webs spokes and the non sticky outer rim. And then there's minor ampulate, which is temporary kind of like a sketch while they're building the web. Then they have flulagem sticky silk for the inside spiral of the web, that little bullseye super sticky. And then to biliform silk
is stiff eggsac business. There's acidiform, which is the saran wrappie sheet that they mummy their prey with. It's two to three times as strong as that first dragline silk. And then there's also aggregate, which is hardcore glue silk. And they're produced by four to six hairy nubbins on their undercarriage called spinnerets, and those each have a bunch of nozzles kind of like froyo dispensers, and then they're stretched out and it's extruded from the glands, from the spinnerets.
Does it look like a glove slowly waving at you, palpating some goo. Yes, it does. But let's get back to the silk itself. And how different from a molecular structure are these six different types of silk.
So all of them have what I call a lego sequence. So those are sequences that naturally when they make a fiber inner digit tape. So they literally have holes and pins just like legos do.
So most of.
The silks have some form of lego. Now it turns out some of them have longer pins, some of them have bigger holes, some of them have you know, some variations, but all of them have something that allows them to stick together to make a fiber. Then the ones that have stretch have in there something looks like a slinky, you know, at a nanoscale. And so when it stretches and you let go, it retracts. The difference is that
it doesn't retract as fast as you stretched it. So in that retraction that loses heat and so it keeps from basically serving as a trampoline.
And how are the spiders determining Okay, I know I need a dragline here to make the framework of my net. I know I need somethings to keep.
It's all genetically programmed. It's absolutely clear. I mean, they have no brain in the sense of being able to make that decision. And so you know, in some cases we can collect the silks from the spider directly, but most of the time it's difficult. For instance, they know that they want to use the prey wrapping silk when they have prey. So it turns out if you can find just the right frequency on the spider, then they'll believe that they have something to wrap and now I'll start
putting that silk out so you can catch that. But most of them are almost impossible to collect because you can't provide the right stimulus.
It's true a web can act like a harp, and spiders here with tiny slits in their feet totally normal and threw little hairs all over their body. So with this markes board of silks, some have to be stronger and cooler than others, right like, some have to be better. And now, which spider has the best silk?
You know, I think that's a tough question. There is a mark spider from South America that is argued to have the strongest silk. Now, it's strongest in the combination of stretch and strength because it stretches lots more than most spider silks do, not because it's necessarily strong. The variations in the silk, even with an individual spider are fairly large because they don't do a good job of controlling the diameter. Really, and whenever you measure strength, you
measure it based on cross sectional area. So obviously if something's fatter, then it's going to be stronger than something that's thinner.
Just side note, think of a braid versus a hare, or a rope versus a thread, or one string of the cheese versus the whole string cheese. I'm so hungry.
So you know, when you say which spider has the best, I think it's which silk is the best, And that's clearly dragline. It's got the best combination of strength and elasticity to give you the you know, that unique combination that no man made material can beat.
Is dragline silk. The one where you're walking into the backyard at night and you get a web on your face and you feel like you're going to die.
Well, I don't know about the last part of that steamum, but certainly it's actually the combination of all of them, because the web has four different silks in it, Okay, so it has major miner, it has the glue, and it has the crapture spilled. So when you hit that, yeah, I think it's probably more the fact that it adheres to your face because of the glue. It also stretches enough so you know you can sort of feel that
your face is going into it. When it finally breaks, it's already now, you know, sort of of attached all over there and stretched tight.
Does that ever happen to you and you go, oh good one, guys.
Not very often, especially because in the rocky mountains most of the webs are relatively well concealed, whereas in places like down south and you know, they stick them out anywhere because they have a much higher opportunity here and the Rockies. Most of them are where there's some light shining or something like that, or in a dark place in a barn. So it has happened occasionally in a barn where you know you just can't see them until it's too late.
The ones that feel like very fine fishing line where you're you can almost feel it snappy. Though, that was stronger than I expected it, And who did I just wake up the thing? Even though I love spiders, I'm like, I definitely don't want to ruin your home. I want to be like Hurricane Alley just coming through ps. One of the most beautiful things I have ever laid my actual eyes on is this eleven by four foot tapestry
woven from golden or weaver silk. It was on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in two thousand and nine, and it looks kind of like a table runner but made out of sunlight, or like a bedspread woven from an angel's laugh. It also looked expensive and took several years of milking wild malagassy
spiders to make. It was not casual. And the work that you're doing with spidery tech, what types of materials do you think that you'll be getting to fabricate and how will that kind of change the way that we live potentially hopefully fingers crossed, all arms crossed.
Yeah, right, So I think that what most people are not very aware of is is that we've been able to develop uses other than just fibers, and I think everybody when you think about spider silk, you think about clothing, you think about climbing ropes, think about lots of things along those lines, but on the fiber. And in addition, we think there's a real opportunity for composite materials, especially something like epoxy based composite materials that comes from two reasons.
One is unique combination of stretch and strength, and there's no other materials out there that you could use for reinforcing to do that.
So a composite epoxy material is usually made of say glass strands or carbon fibers embedded in a glue or a resin. So picture something made out of fiberglass and then imagine an upgrade to spidrin.
The second is that we've found that spider silk can be made into an amazing adhesive. Well, we know ours adheres to plastic it us here ad here's to metilate it, here's to would I mean, there's almost nothing that we can't cote, using it as thin films, using it for coatings, there's almost nothing we can't coat. Everything from medical there's clearly interest in the defense department and lots of things in between.
It seems absolutely unreal that it can be as strong as steel but a lot lighter.
Sure, it's because it's got a combination of strength and stretch, and that's really what makes it unique, I think.
Side note, like we heard in the Bones episode of Osteology, strength and flexibility is what make things work the best. So let spiders inspire you. It's okay to stand up for yourself and be strong, but maybe have some wiggle room or compromise when called for. And walk me through how you have managed to take spider silk and have it made in the lab and made through other organisms instead of having to hand spool anefhela spider in Madagascar. Sure, how are you doing it right?
So you know, as part of the first week we did identified the genes that the spiders used to make spider silk protein.
Okay, this is bananas and it may inspire this year's Halloween costume. Okay, So, almost a decade ago, Randy and a research team were able to splice spider silk making jeans into goats, and the goats then produced liquid spider silk in their milk and Randy was able to filter out the silk and then stretch it to the right
consistency using machinery. So while he got to hold a lot of baby goats and pet baby goats on the head and essentially be a wizardy science shepherd of transgenic spider goats, there was a lot of milk being tossed. So then they spliced the spider silk gene into the DNA of silkworm moths, and rather than standard silk, those caterpillars now on this highly durable and really prized spider
silk with much less waste. And when I visited his lab there were trays of chonky caterpillars just macha mancha manchin on ground mulberry pellets, and there are also other trays filled with soft egg looking cocoons that would be boiled and spooled with the silkworms.
We were able to actually cut and splice the in our gene in exactly the same spot as the gene was for the silkworm silk protein, So now everything there is exactly the same as it was, except there's a different protein being made instead of the silkworm protein is making the spider silk protein and it proceeds to just put it right into the cocoon as if it were its own silk.
And what did you start with? Did you start by putting these genes into E coli? And then did you move up to goats and then alfalfa and then.
Yes, so we started with back here just because they're easy. Yeah, you know, we can put up with a new gene. We can pop it in the colion and get protein in three to four months. We then went to the goats and we worked with a company in Canada who had already developed a technology to get it into the goat's milk, so that we you know, we were able to take their technology and our technology, put them together and and in lip with the spider goats.
Peanut butter, chocolate. Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy these pairings have nothing on spider goats. Now, what if you're too vegan for all? This business is outsourcing spydron limited to goats and caterpillars. Nope, they're also working on cramming the gene into and harvesting silk from alf alfa. Can I
ask questions from listeners? Sure, Oh my gosh, listeners have questions. Okay, before we get into your spidy silk queries, a few words about sponsors of the show who helped make it possible to donate to a cause of the ologists choosing each week. And I realized this week that I forgot to ask Randy, so I rang them up on the horn and he answered it as desk phones man their magic.
And then he said he'd like the donation to go toward the Women's Empowerment and Entrepreneurship Project in Guatemala, which supports women run farming initiatives to bring to market textiles, organic vegetables and free range chickens. And this was through Heifer dot org. Okay, now you may hear some words about some sponsors.
Drivers know what trouble sounds like?
No? No, okay?
Forward, Well no, no pretty, So that's why they get covered from Ireland's soundest car insurance provider, Supervalue Insurance.
Thanks for calling us fin and don't beat yourself up about it. Sure, I'm driving ten years and parallel parking still battles me.
Get a code from Supervalue Car Insurance to get ten percent off online and we'll even throw in forty euroin vouchers teacenc supply vouchers include two twenty euro or forty eurospent. This car insurance is underwritten by AX Insurance, STACK Supervalue Financial Services, STACK Trading and Supervalue Insurance is regulated by the Central Bank of URL.
Okay your questions. Evelyn Jensen wants to know does spider silk come in different colors?
Interestingly enough, the answer is yes to a certain extent. So one of the spiders that we worked with called in Golden or Weaver, and it's silk is actually a gold color. There's another spider that makes sort of a greenish huge silk, and then there's a whole family that make everything from sort of a brownish silk to a pinky silk, but they use it almost exclusively for their egg cases, so it's clearly to camouflage the egg case.
So there's a pretty wide variety of colors that are out there, particularly for the egg cases.
So spiders are just out there using their stiffest silk to make little Easter eggs. Moving on, Deli Dame's Ashley Kelly, Caleb Patten, Canon Purdy, and first time question asker Laurence all echoed Christina's question. Christina Neil wants to know, how do you feel about Spider Man? Is there even an ounce of truth to the idea that spider silk supporting the weight of a human being could be used or can be used in weaponry.
So it turns out that that's a very interesting question, and we have answered it. We got answered. We got asked that question the first time from a children's program at the Canadian Broadcasting Company radio program and they asked us, you know, particularly, I guess it Spider Man two really stops the train, and ask the question, could he really do it? Yeah, So put the students to work on it, and the answers, yes, there's no question. So we you know,
we took it like the last spit on it. A reading was like one hundred and twenty miles an hour, and we counted up how many cars there were and how big the engine. We got rough weights for those, so we were able to calculate how much energy was in that train and then go back and look how many times did he stick the web onto the wall? And the answer is he actually was about three times over having the ability to stop the train. That was
kind of where we left it. Then we got another question and somebody came up with, well, how much would he have to consume to make this? But because it's all protein, right right, So it turns out we calculated that was about had to eat about eighty five pounds of steak a day. So we felt like, yes, it was possible, but clearly, practically it's unlikely that he could have managed to eat enough to make as much spider so protein as as he was able to shoot out.
It's a sizzler. Keeping that in mind, are you hungry? Who else asked about eating? Let's see Brandon Butler wants to know is it true that spiders can eat their silk and recycle it?
The answer is yes, several species do that, some of them do it actually on a daily basis.
And I imagine then they can just kind of destroy and munch on their own web and rebuild it if it gets damaged.
Right, Yes, frequently they don't do that. Usually when it's going to be repaired, they don't seem to clean up the old web. They just put a new one, you know, fill in that area with new silk.
Oh, just imagine an HGTV show where you make a house, but your building materials come from your butt, and then when it kind of starts looking shabby, you just eat the whole house, make another buttthouse. It's rustic, it's resourceful, it's d Why why why? Emily asks, what are cobwebs versus spider webs? And why don't I notice the cobwebs until long after the spider is gone?
So most so cobwebs. The proteins that cobweb weavers use are in many cases very similar to the proteins the orb weavers use. So the cobweb is basically a three dimensional net. It does not have any adhesive on it. Oh, so what happens is that the organism physically gets in and can't find its way out, okay, as opposed to being stuck on the web blight with an orb web.
And so that's one of the major differences. That's why most of those have a more potent poison, because they got to catch them in and keep them from getting.
Away, got it? So black widows right, exactly exactly. So if there's spun as a cobweb, there are a different structure. But also a cobweb can refer to that dusty web that's lost its stick and been abandoned but just think of how many more cobwebs you would have to clean up if spiders didn't do it for you by eating them. Thank you, spider Billy. Marina wants to know how do spiders use their silk to fly? I think he's talking about.
Believing, Yeah, so blowing. Yeah. So basically, especially when they're small, there's a nest of one hundred hundred and fifty little leadbet spiders, and they got to spread out if they're going to eat anything. So what happens is they usually go up into something, they lay a big line off the end, and when the wind gets up, they jump, and their fate is now completely dependent on where they end up.
Can't they get pretty high like ten thousand?
Yeah, they've they've found them. I think they've found them clear into the thirty to forty I mean, the up as high as airplane as the jets fly.
How do they not run out of silk?
They don't. They just put one thing and they'll let the wind get it. So it's like they're putting out a sale. So they use it like a sale.
Oh my gosh, So it really is wherever the wind blows.
Yeah, you got that right, You got that.
Right, okay? And what about the best thing about better silk for your job?
I think the best thing about my job and I always say that you know, it's coming to work and having a realistic expectation that you're going to find something new. Multiple times a year. I have to say that I other than a day I have meetings all day, I would I have not dreaded a day come to work since I started.
For thirty years. For thirty years, Well, thank you so much for doing this. That's such a joy and enjoyed it. Enjoyed it, okay. So ask smart people some silky questions because you'll never know what they know unless you ask. And I hope this has given you greater appreciation for our leggy friends. And this Halloween season, when you see a spider web decoration, just feel free to stop everyone around you inform them of the molecular engineering that goes
into it. So for more on the topics discussed, you can head over to my website. For links, it's aliwar dot com slash ologies slash Spidronology. Also linked is Aliward dot com slash Asmologies, which has dozens more kids safe and shorter episodes. You can blaze Through, and thank you Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio and Shared Sleeper of Mind Jam Media for editing those as well as Zeke Rodriguez Thomas and it says we like to keep things small around here. The rest of the credits are in the
show notes. But before I go, if you stick around to the end, then I give you a piece of advice. And this week my piece of advice is that when you're nervous about something, imagine it going the best way it could. Let's say that you have to give a presentation in class, or you're about to do tryouts for the baseball team. Just imagine it going as well as it could and then go into it with that kind of confidence. That's what I do when I have big
steak stuff. Okay, I hope that helps all right? Bye Bye, soligious.
Pol holurgylogious
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