Silk Harvest

Short answer: Forced silking, or reeling, is a standard way for researchers to collect spider silk. In the Oxford Silk Group's demonstration, a golden orb-weaver, Nephila edulis, is sedated with carbon dioxide and pinned gently in place.

A thread is pulled from the spinnerets with tweezers, fixed to a spool, and a motor reels it in. The group says 30 to 80 meters can be collected in one go, after which the spider goes back to its web. The silk drawn this way is mainly major ampullate (dragline) silk, plus some minor ampullate silk. Each silk type comes from its own gland, and a female of this species can make up to six types. Forced silking isn't identical to natural spinning: a 2004 study in Biomacromolecules found that restrained spiders brake the line hard, putting the fiber under far more stress than a spider descending on its dragline, which can change the silk's properties. Scale is the hard part. For the golden spider-silk cape shown at London's V&A from January 25 to June 5, 2012, Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley's team in Madagascar harnessed wild-caught golden orb-weavers 24 at a time and released them at the end of each day. The cape used the silk of 1.2 million spiders, and the V&A says about 23,000 spiders yield around an ounce of silk. The footage is the Oxford Silk Group's reeling demonstration.