Spider silk is one of the strongest materials in nature. If we could weave it into a rope as thick as a pencil, it would be strong enough to catch a giant jet plane like a fly in a web!
Spider silk is a masterpiece of natural engineering. While it looks delicate and breaks easily when you walk into a cobweb, its strength on a pound-for-pound basis is actually higher than high-grade steel.
The secret to spider silk isn't just that it is strong (tensile strength), but that it is incredibly stretchy (elasticity). When an object hits a web, the silk stretches to absorb the energy instead of snapping instantly.
Spider silk is about five times stronger than steel of the same weight and even tougher than Kevlar, the material used to make bulletproof vests. If humans could mass-produce it, we could use it for everything from super-strong bridge cables to artificial ligaments for the human body.
The problem is that spiders are tiny and don't like to work together (they tend to eat each other if kept in groups). This makes it very hard to "farm" silk. Scientists are currently trying to use gene technology to get other organisms, like goats or bacteria, to produce spider silk proteins for us.
Nature's "fishing line" is a super-material. A strand of spider silk as thick as a pencil would be so tough and stretchy that it could catch a giant airliner mid-air, showing that sometimes the most powerful technology in the world is found in a tiny spider's belly.
