Insects that Spin

A spider made her web in the doorway to our deck. (Two commenters have mentioned that spiders
are not insects, just similar to them.)

The life cycle of monarch butterflies is given a lot of attention, as they fly away to Mexico in the fall.

The Silkworm and Other Creatures

A very poor treatment of a potentially interesting topic.

In a meandering and undisciplined book titled Silk (published 2023) author Aarathi Prasad presents the story of several insects and a few sea creatures that spin silken fibers. Best known is Bombyx Mori the scientific name for the silkworm, a domesticated insect that can live only in the environment provided by its human owners. For millennia, silk thread has been collected from generations of captive Bombyx and woven into cloth. The life and times of the insect are described in detail, but alas, the book is strikingly free of vivid images of the uses of silk fabrics. The book’s few illustrations mainly show portraits of men who studied the science of silk or the natural history of silkworms and other silk producing creatures.

Prasad covers a huge number of topics about silkworms, including a history of their cultivation in a number of places; the use of mulberry trees for their food; the types of cloth made from spun silk; the insects’ anatomy; the names and accomplishments of scientists who studied their anatomy; military uses for silk in such devices as bullet-proof clothing; medical uses for silk fiber and special-purpose fabric; experimental uses for silk, and much more. Further, the author describes several closely-related wild insects and how people managed to capture their silk for various purposes. Historic efforts to use the silk-like fibers produced by sessile sea animals, which use these fibers to cement themselves in place on the sea bed, is another long topic. The level of detail about the sea creatures is frustrating to read, as these efforts on the whole never succeeded in a practical way, so it’s more of a digression than a relevant topic for the book.

Prasad finds that almost any subject is worthy of a digression. Did a scientist who later worked on silk come from an interesting historic city? You’ll read a long description of the city which in fact had no relevance to silk at all. Did the silk from one of the sea creatures appear in a Roman grave or in a Medieval archaeology site? You’ll find out a whole lot of stuff about that. Why do we need a full paragraph describing all the features of a house in Pompeii where a silk item was found? Silk was used in one of the earliest examples of knitted fabric — does this mean we need to go back and hear about a completely irrelevant city where ANOTHER early knit item made of some other fabric was found? The indisciplined digressions are mostly maddening to read. 

Only one topic is missing that might seem quite relevant: there’s virtually no discussion of how silk textiles look or how they were used in fashion through the ages. There’s very little description of how the threads were spun, processed, dyed, or crafted into fashion items like clothing, upholstery or other uses like for tents or blankets; for example, I would like to have heard about just what textiles were displayed in the numerous silk stalls at the famous Crystal Palace Exposition that the author mentioned.

I did enjoy the one and only description of a popular wild silk fabric from a not-domesticated silkworm in the 19th century, which was shown at the famous Paris Exposition. I wish there had been more about such fabrics — I loved the fact that the wild silk fabric could be dyed fourteen “gem colors” that were “wonderfully named sapphire, emerald, topaz, pink topaz, spinel-ruby, beryl, jacinth, chrysoprase, amethyst, coral, gold-quartz, turquoise, ruby, and peridot, all laid out like jewels in a glass case in the great exhibition hall in the heart of Paris.” (p. 129)

The book is so silent about fashion that I didn’t even find out, from reading it, the functions that silk fabrics played in the fashions of various historic eras, other than generically for clothing. The only memorable description of a garment was of a dress worn by Queen Anne, wife of James I of England, which was embroidered with images of silkworms on the sleeves. The book didn’t include an illustration of this intriguing dress, but I found it online and here it is:

As you can tell, I think you should avoid reading this book. Review © 2024 mae sander.

NOTE ADDED Sept. 10: A review of this book by Jenny Uglow titled “Worms’ Work” summarizes all the interesting parts and leaves out all the irrelevant parts. It’s behind a paywall, but if you can get to it here’s the link:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/09/19/worms-work-silk-aarathi-prasad/