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If you like Johan Rijpma's scotch tape animation Tape Generations we featured on the blog, you'll get a kick out of this: a gigantic cocoon made from packing tape by design collective For Use/Numen:
The team uses nothing but packing tape to create huge, self-supporting cocoons that visitors could climb inside and explore. [...]
The installations, which look like the work of horrifyingly large arachnids, grew in scale and scope as the year progressed, first deployed inside a small Croatian gallery, then an abandoned attic during October’s Vienna Design Week.
At the last installation inside Odeon, a former stock exchange building in Vienna, the group used nearly 117,000 feet and 100 pounds of tape.
FastCompany has more pics as well as a video clip showing us how it was made: Link
The floods in Pakistan devastated not only the human population of that country, but much of its fauna. Many spiders survived only by crowding into trees, producing pictures like those you see above. Duncan Geere of Wired UK explains:
With more than a fifth of the country submerged, millions of spiders climbed into trees to escape the rising floodwaters. The water took so long to recede, the trees became covered in a cocoon of spiderwebs. The result is an eerie, alien panorama, with any vegetation covered in a thick mass of webbing. (You can see images from the region in the gallery linked below.)
However, the unusual phenomenon may be a blessing in disguise. Britain’s department for international development reports that areas where the spiders have scaled the trees have seen far fewer malaria-spreading mosquitos than might be expected, given the prevalence of stagnant, standing water.
Article and Gallery via Geekosystem | Photo: UK Department for International Development
Previously: Giant Spider Web
Three years ago, Alex linked to a story about a spider web that was 200 yards wide. It was made by many spiders sharing the same web. Scientists recently discovered a spider in Madagascar that can individually create a web 80 feet across. It’s called the Darwin’s bark spider, and makes the largest orb-type spider webs in the world:
It is so big that it can catch 30 or more prey insects at any one time.
Darwin’s bark spider weaves what experts call an orb web, the most familiar spider web design.[...]
“They build their web with the orb suspended directly above a river or the water body of a lake, a habitat that no other spider can use,” says Professor Ingi Agnarsson, the director of the Museum of Zoology at the University of Puerto Rico, in San Juan who made the discovery with colleagues.
That allows the spiders to catch insects flying over water, and explains why the web is so long.
To reach from one bank to the other, the spider must weave anchoring lines of up to 25m.
Because the web must sustain a comparatively enormous weight over broad distances, researchers are particularly interested in how the web is designed and the composition of the silk. It’s 100% tougher than any known silk and is the toughest biological substance known.
Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: M. Kunter
The art collective For Use/Numen created a giant spider web out of packing tape:
At the last installation inside Odeon, a former stock exchange building in Vienna, the group used nearly 117,000 feet and 100 pounds of tape. “The installation is based on an idea for a dance performance in which the form evolves from the movement of the dancers between the pillars,” explains For Use’s Christoph Katzler. “The dancers are stretching the tape while they move, so the resulting shape is a recording of the choreography.”
Link via DudeCraft | Photo: Fast Company | Artists’ Website
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The largest piece of cloth ever made from spider silk measures four feet wide and eleven feet long. To make it, 70 people collected golden orb spiders over four years! The spiders were then hooked up to a machine that extracted the silk from the spiders without harming them, in a project headed by Nicholas Godley and textile expert Simon Peers.
To get as much silk as they needed, Godley and Peers began hiring dozens of spider handlers to collect wild arachnids and carefully harness them to the silk-extraction machine. “We had to find people who were willing to work with spiders,” Godley said, “because they bite.”
By the end of the project, Godley and Peers extracted silk from more than 1 million female golden orb spiders, which are abundant throughout Madagascar and known for the rich golden color of their silk. Because the spiders only produce silk during the rainy season, workers collected all the spiders between October and June.
Then an additional 12 people used hand-powered machines to extract the silk and weave it into 96-filament thread. Once the spiders had been milked, they were released into back into the wild, where Godley said it takes them about a week to regenerate their silk. “We can go back and re-silk the same spiders,” he said. “It’s like the gift that never stops giving.”
The resulting cloth is on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Link
