As Randy Lewis makes his morning rounds in the laboratory, he swats at a few stray flies--the ones that got away during the night. Then, bending over a glass cage, he cups his hands and gently lifts the occupant to eye level. Hello, lady, he says, his affection undiminished by the sight of this lady’s eight hairy legs and eight eyes, and the knowledge that she just spent the night hanging upside down devouring live flies.
It’s silking time in Room 255 of the University of Wyoming’s department of molecular biology. In a few minutes the spider in Lewis’s hand--oops, make that the one skittering up his arm--will be flat on its back under a microscope, legs restrained by Scotch tape, spinning silk for science. For the spider, it’s 20 minutes of hard labor, 100 yards of silk, and then back to the cage for another fly. For the tweezers-wielding researchers, the hard part is grasping the first wisp of silk extruded by the spider. After that it’s easy: they just wrap the thread around a spool mounted on a quarter-inch electric drill and reel off the silk, yards at a time.
The faint of heart make wide detours around Lewis’s lab these days, warned off by the foot-long rubber spider in the doorway. Anyone else soon comes face to face with the real thing. Several glass tanks house Lewis’s supplies of fist-size female Nephila clavipes, or golden orb weavers (males of the species don’t spin silk). But here, amid the clutter of beakers and petri dishes, the spiders are celebrities, revered for their mastery of 380 million years of protein chemistry and the ease with which they spin their astonishingly light, tenacious, stretchy fibers.
