Spiders
put a great deal of effort into spinning silk, building webs and the keeping
them in good repair. Not all their threads are the same though. The thickest
and strongest is their dragline silk. Over the centuries we have looked at the
silk and tried to make use of it.
Wound
dressing is one application that was tried many years ago with some success and
it has been used as cross hairs in some scientific equipment, but not many
other practical uses have been devised. The main reason is the collection of
large enough quantities that would be required for commercial exploitation.
However,
a new high-end use has been tried out by Osaki at Nara Med. U (1, 2). Dr. Osaki
has been ranching a brand of golden orb-weaver spiders in his lab in Japan. With
three hundred of these working hard, he has collected dragline silk to twist
into fibers.
Up
to 5,000 strands were twisted together first and then three of these fibers
were twisted together in the opposite direction. The resulting fibers were used
to string Dr. Osaki’s violin. They are strong and elastic; stronger than gut
but not as strong as nylon strings.
The
twisting process binds them so tightly together that the fibers deform to make
intimate contact with their neighbors and leaving no gaps inside the bundle.
The
elasticity of the strings is such that the overtones of the notes played are
more pronounced than those produced with conventional stringing. This is most
marked with the higher notes. The net result in psychoacoustic terms is an
enhanced timbre or tonal quality – one of those difficult things to describe
but one knows it when one hears it.
Perhaps
we will soon hear a Stradivarius strung with dragline silk for the ultimate
musical experience.
- http://prl.aps.org/accepted/L/25078Ye0Yef1163de18a8722105e7914a797506ee
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17232058
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