Smologies #30: SPIDERWEBS with Randy Lewis
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Oh, hey, it's that bottle of mustard. You don't even remember buying, but you've moved with twice now. Allie Ward. Oh, we're walking into spider webs for Smologies. Here's the deal. Smologies are shorter, edited to be kid friendly and classroom safe versions of our original episodes. So if you're not with kids, you can go ahead and have the full version. It's linked in the show notes. But hey, if you're looking for something shorter and less swearier, you've come to the right place. Okay, here we go. Spy.

spider webs. Okay, I just want to say if you're listening, you're not a huge fan of spiders, I want to tell you that you're brave. I'm proud of you. And spoiler alert, this is not scary at all. We barely even talk about spiders themselves, but rather we just kind of focus on things that come out of their rears. So for anyone in your life who's a spider-phobe,

just gently maybe send them this episode. Tell them it's a great way to admire the critters, and there are very few goosebumps in the road ahead. So one day, we're going to work up to arachnology. We're going to talk about the animals themselves one day, but today is not that day, my friends. So today, we're just walking into spider webs. Okay, spider-nology. What is

In the dark, shadowy night is that. So unless you are a spider doctor, you probably did not know that there is a word for spider webs and it's spidroins. Well, spidroins are the main proteins in spider silk and they're as strong as steel, but they're more flexible and they're similar to collagen or keratin. We're going to get into it. So yes, kiddos, this is a whole episode unraveling the mysteries and looking into the future of spider silk. What it is, how it works.

how it may change all of our lives. So stick around to get a lifetime's worth of appreciation and context about what a spider web is, what it's made of, how strong a single thread can be, how it's synthesized in labs, future medical uses, some superhero flim flam, transgenic goats, gene splicing, and the most beautiful thing I have ever seen with Utah State biology professor and your new favorite...

Spidroenologist, Dr. Randy Lewis.

Cool beans. So if you could tell me your first and last name and how you pronounce it. Randy Lewis. Dr. Randy Lewis. Dr. Randy Lewis. Walk me through a little bit about what is spider silk. Because I know enough about a spider butt to know that different things comes out of their silk glands. Yes. What's going on? So the spiders that we work with make six different kinds of silk and a glue. They're the ones that make the typical round web. It's called an orb web.

that most people think about that spiders make. Okay, side note. If you're wondering what invisible force has captured your face, what gossamer-thready creation has veiled you at night, those are likely the work of orb-weaver spiders. They are architects and artisans. They are craft spiders.

Their talent is innate, and their spiral spiderwebs are just iconic. Now, some, like the Nephila golden orb weavers, spin this brilliant yellow silk. It just glimmers. It's like threads of gold. So what's up with cobwebs? Well, spiderweb tends to mean one that is still inhabited, and cobwebs refer to old abandoned ones. So once they get dusty, they tend to lose their tack. But

A cobweb is also a typoweb, one that's less of a two-planed spiral net, more of a three-dimensional maze. We'll get into that in a bit. And they use the silks for very different purposes, and they have very different mechanical properties. So, you know, evolutionarily, you sort of have...

a lot of evolutionary tinkering that went on before we ever got to take a look at it. So basically, in most of the glands, there's a couple of them that they don't produce silk all the time, but generally they produce silk, put it in a gland. They have it in a form that's still not completely identified, but we think they're sort of very small little balls of protein that are present in there.

Then when they pull the silk out, so they pull it out like floss, they don't squeeze it out like toothpaste. Okay. So all of the silks have to be pulled out. And when they pull that, the silk at the very end of a tube going down from the gland that they make it to the outside...

All the silk then behind it starts to get pulled out because it's very viscous. On the trip down that tube, the shear forces cause the protein molecules to basically line up. Like you can imagine if you were to take spaghetti, start getting it down through a funnel, all the spaghetti has to line up or it doesn't go down. And now I'm hungry. So that's what's happening in this trip down there. When they do that, they actually, protein molecules lock together.

and become insoluble and that's how the fiber forms amazingly enough it can happen in as little as 10 milliseconds so if you see a spider fall that silk is solidifying in in milliseconds as it comes out of the spider

And do they use a combination of their spinnerets or their legs or gravity? What gives it that force? All of the above. So they can't squeeze it out. So they either have to pull it out with their leg. The other thing they can do is attach it to something and walk away from it. Okay. So the silk that most people are interested in called dragline silk. And it's dragline because when they walk away, they drag it behind them. Okay. So if you see a spider crawling across a ceiling, for instance, if you watch it,

It'll crawl for a little ways and then it'll start wiggling its butt. We can't stop twerking about it. When it does that, it's using another silk to attach the major silk to some kind of a protrusion on the wall. So just like a climber, you know, if a climber climbs so far, then they put a piton or a hook or something in there. It's exactly what spiders have been doing for 400 million years. So rock climbers are a little behind on the deal here. And in addition, they can stick the silk to almost anything.

now they have trouble with something like teflon but they can stick it to glass wonderfully

So, you know, you put them in a glass aquarium, for instance, or a plexiglass aquarium, and you can see the little attachments where they put all their silk down. That is how they produce the silk and have to pull it out. And what are some other types of silk? Because you said six. Okay, so real quick, they've got major ampullate or dragline silk, one that is just super strong. It's as strong as steel, but it's tougher, and it acts as those webs, spokes,

and the non-sticky outer rim. And then there's minor ampullate, which is temporary, kind of like a sketch while they're building the web. Then they have flagelliform sticky silk for the inside spiral of the web, that little bullseye, super sticky. And then tubiliform silk is stiff egg sac silk.

business. There's Aciniform, which is the saran-wrappy sheet that they mummy their prey with. It's two to three times as strong as that first dragline silk. And then there's also Aggregate, which is hardcore glue silk. And they're produced by four to six hairy nobbins on their undercarriage called spinnerets. And those each have a bunch of nozzles, kind of like Froyo dispensers. And

And then they're stretched out and it's extruded from the glands from the spinnerets. Does it look like a glove slowly waving at you, palpating some goo? Yes, it does. But let's get back to the silk itself.

And how different from a molecular structure are these six different types of silk? So all of them have what I call a Lego sequence. So those are sequences that naturally, when they make a fiber, interdigitate. So they literally have holes and pins just like Legos do. Wow.

So, most of the silks have some form of Lego. Now, it turns out some of them have longer pins, some of them have bigger holes, some of them have, you know, some variations, but all of them have something that allows them to stick together to make a fiber. Then, the ones that have stretch have...

In there, something looks like a slinky, you know, at a nanoscale. And so when it stretches and you let go, it retracts. The difference is it doesn't retract as fast as you stretched it. So in that retraction, it loses heat. And so it keeps from basically serving as a trampoline. And how are the spiders determining, okay, I know I need a drag line here to make the framework of my net. I know I need something sticky.

It's all genetically programmed. It's absolutely clear. I mean, they have no brain in the sense of being able to make that decision. And so, you know, in some cases we can collect the silks from the spider directly, but most of the time it's difficult. For instance, they know that they want to use the prey wrapping silk when they have prey. So it turns out if you can find just the right frequency...

on the spider, then they'll believe that they have something to wrap. And they'll start putting that silk out so you can catch that. But most of them are almost impossible to collect because you can't provide the right stimulus.

It's true, a web can act like a harp, and spiders hear with tiny slits in their feet, totally normal, and through little hairs all over their body. So with this smorgasbord of silks, some have to be stronger and cooler than others, right? Like some have to be better.

And now, which spider has the best silk? You know, I think that's a tough question. There is a bark spider from South America that is argued to have the strongest silk. Now, it's strongest in the combination of stretch and strength.

Because it stretches lots more than most spider silks do. Not because it's necessarily strong. The variations in the silk, even with an individual spider, are fairly large because they don't do a good job of controlling the diameter. Really? And whenever you measure strength, you measure it based on cross-sectional area.

So obviously, if something's fatter, then it's going to be stronger than something that's thinner. Just side note, think of a braid versus a hair or a rope versus a thread or one string of the cheese versus the whole string cheese.

I'm so hungry. So, you know, when you say which spider has the best, I think it's which silk is the best. And that's clearly dragline. It's got the best combination of strength and elasticity to give you the, you know, that unique combination that no man-made material can be. Is dragline silk the one where you're walking into the backyard at night and you get a web on your face and you feel like you're going to die? Yeah.

Well, I don't know about the last part of that statement, but certainly it's actually the combination of all of them because the web has four different silks in it. Okay. So it has major, minor. It has the glue and it has the craps you're spilt. So when you hit that, I think it's probably more the fact that it adheres to your face.

because of the glue. It also stretches enough. So, you know, you can sort of feel that your face is going into it. When it finally breaks, it's already now, you know, sort of attached all over there and stretched tight. Does that ever happen to you? And you go, oh, good one, guys.

Not very often, especially because in the Rocky Mountains, most of the webs are relatively well concealed. Whereas in places like down south and, you know, they stick them out anywhere because they have a much higher opportunity here. In the Rockies, most of them are where there's some light shining or something like that or in a dark place in a barn. So it has happened occasionally in a barn where, you know, you just can't see them until it's too late.

The ones that feel like very fine fishing line where you can almost feel it snap. That was stronger than I expected it. And who did I just wake up? Right. Even though I love spiders, I'm like, I definitely don't want to ruin your home. I want to be like Hurricane Alley just coming through.

P.S. One of the most beautiful things I have ever laid my actual eyes on is this 11 by 4 foot tapestry woven from golden or weaver silk. It was on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 2009. And it looks kind of like a table runner, but made out of sunlight or like a bedspread woven from an angel's laugh.

It also looked expensive and took several years of milking wild Malagasy spiders to make. It was not casual. And the work that you're doing with Spidey Tech, what types of materials are

do you think that you'll be getting to fabricate and how will that kind of change the way that we live potentially, hopefully, fingers crossed, all arms crossed. - Yeah, right. So I think that what most people are not very aware of is that we've been able to develop uses other than just fibers. And I think everybody, when you think about spider silk, you think about clothing, you think about climbing ropes, think about lots of things along those lines. But on the fiber end, in addition,

We think there's a real opportunity for composite materials, especially something like epoxy-based composite materials. That comes from two reasons. One is unique combination of stretch and strength.

And there's no other materials out there that you could use for reinforcing to do that. So a composite epoxy material is usually made of, say, glass strands or carbon fibers embedded in a glue or a resin. So picture something made out of fiberglass and then imagine an upgrade to spiderine.

The second is that we found that spider silk can be made into an amazing adhesive. Well, we know ours adheres to plastic. It adheres to metal. It adheres to wood. I mean, there's almost nothing that we can't coat. Using it as thin films, using it for coatings, there's almost nothing we can't coat.

Everything from medical to there's clearly interest in the Defense Department and lots of things in between. It seems absolutely unreal that it can be as strong as steel, but a lot lighter.

Sure. It's because it's got a combination of strength and stretch. And that's really what makes it unique, I think. Side note, like we heard in the bones episode of osteology, strength and flexibility is what make things work the best. So let spiders inspire you. It's okay to stand up for yourself and be strong, but maybe have some wiggle room or compromise when called for. And walk me through how you have managed to take spider silk and

and have it made in the lab and made through other organisms instead of having to hand spool a Nephila spider in Madagascar. Sure. How are you doing it? Right. So, you know, as part of the first week we did, I identified the genes that the spiders use to make spider silk protein. Okay. This is bananas, and it may inspire this year's Halloween costume. Okay. So almost a decade ago, Randy and a research team were able to splice bananas

spider silk making jeans into goats. And the goats then produced liquid spider silk in their milk. And Randy was able to filter out the silk and then stretch it to the right consistency using machinery. So...

Well, he got to hold a lot of baby goats and pet baby goats on the head and essentially be a wizardy science shepherd of transgenic spider goats. There was a lot of milk being tossed. So then they spliced the spider silk gene into the DNA of silkworm moths. And rather than standard silk, those caterpillars now spun this highly durable and really prized spider silk with much less waste.

And when I visited his lab, there were trays of chonky caterpillars just munching, munching, munching on ground mulberry pellets. And there were also other trays filled with soft egg-looking cocoons that would be boiled and spooled. With the silkworms, we were able to actually cut and splice in our gene in exactly the same spot as the gene was for the silkworm silk protein.

So now everything there is exactly the same as it was, except there's a different protein being made instead of the silkworm protein is making the spider silk protein. And it proceeds to just put it right into the cocoon as if it were its own silk.

And what did you start with? Did you start by putting these genes into E. coli and then did you move up to goats and then alfalfa? Yes. So we started with bacteria just because they're easy. We can come up with a new gene. We can pop it in E. coli and get protein in three to four months. We then went to the goats and we worked with a company in Canada who had already developed a technology to get it into the goat's milk.

So that we, you know, we were able to take their technology and our technology, put them together and end up with the spider goats. Peanut butter chocolate, Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy. These pairings have nothing on spider goats. Now, what if you're too vegan for all this business? Is outsourcing spider wine limited to goats and caterpillars? Nope. They're also working on cramming the gene into and harvesting silk from alfalfa. Okay.

Can I ask questions from listeners? Sure. Oh my gosh. Listeners, have questions. Okay, before we get into your Spidey Silk queries, a few words about sponsors of the show who help make it possible to donate to a cause of theologist choosing each week. And I realized this week that I forgot to ask Randy, so I rang him up on the horn and he answered at his desk. Phones, man.

They're magic. And then he said he'd like the donation to go toward the Women's Empowerment and Entrepreneurship Project in Guatemala, which supports women-run farming initiatives to bring to market textiles, organic vegetables, and free-range chickens. And this was through heifer.org. Okay, now you may hear some words about some sponsors.

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Okay, your questions. Evelyn Jensen wants to know, does spider silk come in different colors?

Interestingly enough, the answer is yes to a certain extent. So one of the spiders that we work with is called a golden orb weaver and its silk is actually a gold color. There's another spider that makes sort of a greenish-hued silk. And then there's a whole family that make everything from sort of a brownish silk to a pinkish silk, but they use it almost exclusively for their egg cases.

So it's clearly to camouflage the egg case. So there's a pretty wide variety of colors that are out there, particularly for the egg cases. So spiders are just out there using their stiffest silk to make little Easter eggs. Moving on. Deli Dames, Ashley Kelly, Caleb Patton,

cannon party and first time question asker, Laurence, all echoed Christina's question. Christina Neal wants to know, how do you feel about Spider-Man? Is there even an ounce of truth to the idea that spider silk supporting the weight of a human being could be used or that it could be used in weaponry?

So it turns out that that's a very interesting question, and we have answered it. We got asked that question the first time from a children's program at the Canadian Broadcasting Company radio program. And they asked us, you know, particularly, I guess, if Spider-Man 2 really stops the train. And that's the question. Could he really do it? Yeah. So put the students to work on it. And the answer is yes.

There's no question. So we took it like the last speedometer reading was like 120 miles an hour. And we counted up how many cars there were and how big the engine. We got rough weights for those. So we were able to calculate how much energy was in that train. And then go back and look how many times did he stick the web onto the wall. And the answer is he actually was about three times over having the ability to stop the train. That was kind of where we left it.

Then we got another question and somebody came up with, well, how much would he have to consume to make the spice? Because it's all protein. Right, right. So it turns out we calculated that was about, had to eat about 85 pounds of steak a day. Yeah.

So we felt like, yes, it was possible. But clearly, practically, it's unlikely that he could have managed to eat enough to make as much spider silk protein as he was able to shoot out. Keeping that in mind, are you hungry? Who else asked about eating? Let's see. Brandon Butler wants to know, is it true that spiders can eat their silk and recycle it? The answer is yes. Several species do that. Some of them do it actually on a daily basis.

And I imagine then they can just kind of destroy and munch on their own web and rebuild it if it gets damaged, right? Yes. Frequently they don't do that. Usually when it's going to be repaired, they don't seem to clean up the old web. They just put a new one, you know, fill in that area with new silk. Oh, okay.

Just imagine an HGTV show where you make a house, but your building materials come from your butt. And then when it kind of starts looking shabby, you just eat the whole house, make another butt house. It's rustic. It's resourceful. It's DIY. Why? Why? Why?

Emily asks, what are cobwebs versus spiderwebs? And why don't I notice the cobwebs until long after the spider is gone? So cobwebs, the proteins that cobweb weavers use are in many cases very similar to the proteins the orb weavers use. So the cobweb is basically a three-dimensional net. It does not have any adhesive on it. So what happens is that the organism physically gets in and can't find its way out.

Okay. As opposed to being stuck on the web like with an orb web. And so that's one of the major differences. That's why most of those have a more potent poison because they got to catch them and keep them from getting away. Got it. So like a black widow. Right. Exactly. Exactly.

So if they're spun as a cobweb, they're a different structure. But also a cobweb can refer to that dusty web that's lost its stick and been abandoned. But just think of how many more cobwebs you would have to clean up if spiders didn't do it for you by eating them. Thank you, spider.

Billy Marina wants to know, how do spiders use their silk to fly? I think he's talking about ballooning. Yeah, so ballooning. Yeah. So basically, especially when they're small, there's a nest of 100, 150 little itty bitty spiders. And they got to spread out if they're going to eat anything. So what happens is they usually go up into something. They lay a big line off the end. And when the wind gets up, they jump.

And their fate is now completely dependent on where they end up. Can't they get pretty high, like 10,000 feet or something? Yeah, they found them. I think they found them clear into the 30 to 40, I mean, up as high as the jets fly. How do they not run out of silk? They don't. They just put one thing in and let the wind get it. So it's like they're putting out a sail. So they use it like a sail. Oh, wow.

Oh, my gosh. So it really is wherever the wind blows. You got that right. You got that right. OK. And what about the best thing about Spider Silk or your job? I think the best thing about my job, and I always say that, you know, it's coming to work and having a realistic expectation that you're going to find something new multiple times a year. I have to say that I other than a day I have meetings all day, I would I have not dreaded a day coming to work.

Since I started. For 30 years? For 30 years. Well, thank you so much for doing this. This was such a joy. Enjoyed it. Enjoyed it. Okay, so ask smart people some silky questions because you'll never know what they know unless you ask. And I hope this has given you greater appreciation for our leggy friends. And this Halloween season, when you see a spider web decoration, just...

Feel free to stop everyone around you, inform them of the molecular engineering that goes into it. So for more on the topics discussed, you can head over to my website for links. It's allyward.com slash ologies slash spydronology. Also linked is allyward.com slash smologies, which has dozens more kids safe and shorter episodes you can blaze through. And thank you, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio and Jared Sleeper of Mindjam Media for editing those as well as Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas.

And since we like to keep things small around here, the rest of the credits are in the show notes. But before I go, if you stick around to the end, then I give you a piece of advice. And this week, my piece of advice is that when you're nervous about something, imagine it going the best way it could. Let's say that you have to give a presentation in class or you're about to do tryouts for the baseball team. Just imagine it going as well as it could and then go into it with that kind of confidence. That's what I do when I have big steak stuff. Okay, I hope that helps. All right, bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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