Silk Harvest

Large-scale silk harvesting from spiders is notoriously difficult due to spiders’ territorial and cannibalistic behavior, making farming unfeasible.

Unlike silkworms, spiders produce small quantities of silk and require individual housing, drastically increasing labor and cost.

One of the few successful large-scale efforts occurred in Madagascar, where over 1 million golden orb-weaver spiders were hand-collected to produce just 11 feet of silk cloth, a process that took years.

Because of these limitations, synthetic spider silk—produced via genetically engineered bacteria, yeast, or even goats—has become the primary focus for scalable applications in medicine, textiles, and aerospace.