Prehistoric Nature Study and the Spider Pavillion

This week we ventured to downtown Los Angeles to the Natural History Museum. The NHM is known for it's magnificent dinosaur skeletons, or at least that's what I remember about it from when I was a kid.

But they also have an amazing insect exhibit and in the Fall they transform their Butterfly Pavilion into a Spider Pavilion.  The spider that was most visible in the pavilion was the Golden Silk Orb-Weaver (agriope aurantiia), which is also known as the Common Garden Spider and the Black and Yellow Agriope.  It turns out that this spider matures in the Fall, which explains why they were so prevalent.  According to the Insects of the Los Angeles Basin (a field guide I picked up at the museum), "this spider and other orb weavers are sometimes called 'writing spiders' because of the appearance of the stabilmentum [web decoration], which seems to some imaginative people to contain letters of the alphabet."

This spider also produces silk that is stronger than steel or Kevlar and was used historically in textiles in Madagascar.  According to Wired Science, "the French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué . . .  worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them." This was the inspiration for textile expert Simon Peers to attempt to make a rare textile from spider silk. 

 Here's a video of the project:

It's amazing what these creatures can produce.