Banana Spider

• Its golden silk is among the strongest natural fibres known and has been studied for decades for making surgical sutures and high-strength materials.
• Silk from more than a million of these spiders was woven in Madagascar into a golden cape that was exhibited in London and New York, the only large-scale spider silk textile ever made.
• The males are minute and live at the edge of the female's web, feeding on her leftovers.
• Its golden silk is one of the most studied natural fibres: it combines strength comparable to steel with enormous elasticity, and that mix makes it a tough material with no synthetic equivalent.
• An exceptional textile was woven from the silk of spiders in this genus: a cape and a shawl exhibited in London and New York, for which silk was collected from more than a million spiders in Madagascar over eight years.
• Its web is permanent — it does not rebuild it every night — and can reach more than a metre across. The golden hue is thought to attract insects in full sun and to camouflage the web in the shade.
• Sexual dimorphism is extreme: the female can weigh more than a hundred times as much as the male, who lives at the edge of her web without being attacked.
• It often shares its web with tiny kleptoparasitic spiders of the genus Argyrodes, which steal small prey from it while it can do nothing about them.
• Its silk has been trialled as a guide for the regeneration of peripheral nerves.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (arachnid)

Habitat & environment

Rainforest and forest edges of tropical and subtropical America

Sources consulted: Vollrath y Knight (2001), Nature; Museo de Historia Natural de Londres, exposición Golden Spider Silk; Allmeling et al., regeneración nerviosa con seda de araña