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My questions- how many spiders does it take to make a gallon a day, how would one mechanize and automate the milking process, and how does their milk taste? On
by mchannon 8y ago
My questions- how many spiders does it take to make a gallon a day, how would one mechanize and automate the milking process, and how does their milk taste?
Once you get past the squeamishness of it, if it tastes good, is non-toxic, and can become cheese and other dairy products, a large part of our ecological footprint might be reduced. It can't be anywhere near as disruptive to the ecosystem as modern cattle.
Jumping spiders are carnivorous, and eat ants and other spiders. I'd imagine things that we currently can't add to our food chain, like compostable waste, trees, and forest understory, could underpin the diet of the 22nd century.
We could even feed spider milk to cows.
- jf- 8y agoI don’t think you realistically can milk a spider. ...another sentence I never thought I’d say.
- Sharlin 8y agoSame problem with spider silk. An awesome material but slightly difficult to harvest on an industrial scale.
- amelius 8y agoCan't we engineer the spiders to grow bigger? Or transplant the milk-gene to, say, tarantulas? (I'm not a biologist, so no idea if these are good ideas or even make sense)
- EGreg 8y agoWhat’s this desire to treat animals as just expendable biological machines as soon as you figure out they can secrete a substance you like? What about the consequences affecting the animals themselves from all those fattening antibiotics, being chained up or whatever?
- drngdds 8y agoThey don't matter very much here because unlike cows, spiders probably can't experience suffering.
- vibrato 8y agoIt’s called being a human. We are intelligent apex predators who exploit everything we possibly can.
- felipemnoa 8y agoWith an emphasis on predators.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y agoFor the record, we're not the only species who farms other animals. E.g. carpenter ants famously farm aphids (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_ant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_ant). And of course our skill at exploiting other animals for sustenance is nothing compared to that of parasites.
- EGreg 8y agoHoneypot ants farm their own, interesting.
- walrus66 8y agoLet's not engineer bigger spiders, please
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago>> Can't we engineer the spiders to grow bigger? Well, if we can we should make them really big, like cows, then we can use them as vehicles. Imagine riding a spider up a vertical surface, would be dead cool. I'd call mine Larry.
- the8472 8y agoThat wouldn't work due to the cube-square law. Spiders can't even get enough oxygen at cow sizes due to their book lungs.
- dsnuh 8y agoPump pure oxygen into the grow-domes.
- codeisawesome 8y agoYou are only making them look more awesome by suggesting attached oxygen tanks.
- jf- 8y agoWorld: We need a solution to climate change! HN: Ok, picture this - gigantic, genetically engineered, milkable tarantulas!
- codeisawesome 8y agoI’m actually proud of how far along this sub thread people have kept a straight face!
- conanbatt 8y agoWe were so worried about what we could do, that we didn't consider what we should do. - Anon, before the tarantula massacre
- NicoJuicy 8y agoLol, this made my day :D
- Shivetya 8y agolikely you would breed them to the point they create milk and then crush and strain the results, repeating in huge batches. Industrialized farming has many traits some would find distasteful if they understood it.
- TallGuyShort 8y agoOh you can milk anything with nipples.
- chrisseaton 8y agoIt isn't literally milk - it's a 'nutritive fluid' and they say they're just calling it milk for convenience. It appears to be in some form of dissolved unused eggs? I'm not an entomologist. > We suggest this milk might have evolved from trophic eggs, unviable eggs functioning as a food for newly emerged offspring
- dao- 8y ago> It isn't literally milk It isn't cow milk, but other than that I'm not really sure what you're saying. Milk is what you get when milking an animal. It's a pretty broad term. However I do doubt that this would be as nutritious to humans as milk from cows or other mammals.
- DJBunnies 8y agoMilk is explicitly defined as coming from mammary glands in mammals.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- yayana 8y agoHow are mammals defined?
- tejtm 8y agophylogenetically[0] [0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Browser/wwwtax.cgi?mode=Undef&id=40674 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Browser/wwwtax.cgi?mod...
- checkyoursudo 8y agohttps://www.etymonline.com/word/milk https://www.etymonline.com/word/milk This says people have been calling other things milk for at least 800 years and suggests the origination might be in the verb form rather than the noun form. Also, defined by whom?
- OnlyRepliesToBS 8y agothe mentality
- novia 8y agoThere is no reason to suspect that this would be useful for human nutrition. It's not all about humans. Sometimes we just discover cool things.
- peteretep 8y ago> There is no reason to suspect that this would be useful for human nutrition Do spiders have some kind of different macronutrients?
- wcoenen 8y agoI don't know about macronutrients, but the required micronutrients would be very different. For example, spiders have hemocyanin instead of hemoglobin in their blood, so their oxygen transport is based on copper instead of iron. (Maybe not the best example because cow milk is not a good source of iron either, but I'm sure there are other more relevant differences like this.)
- vibrato 8y agoYou’re making a ton of assumptions. Maybe the milk of mammals is more nutritious to mammals than spider “milk” would be.
- gpm 8y ago> It can't be anywhere near as disruptive to the ecosystem as modern cattle. Farming spiders sounds a lot more inefficient than farming cows to me. Cows eat plants eat sunlight. Spiders eat ants eat plants eat sunlight (or longer chains). The rule of thumb is each step only transfers 10% of the energy. Cows are nice and easier to herd, have live on the land with minimal infrastructure. Spiders sound like you'd have to keep them in relatively expensive closed rooms or something. Cows have been bread into great farm animals that produce large amounts of milk, spiders have not.
- jjoonathan 8y agoClearly, the solution is to breed really big spiders and then milk them.
- lifeformed 8y agoYou just wanted to fill our minds with the concept of spider cheese.
- village-idiot 8y agoOr, we could just use better animal husbandry techniques already developed rather than moonshot plans. Meat/Dairy only makes up 3.6% of America’s CO2 budget, far less than the “meat is killing the planet!!1!” crowd claims.
- monadgonad 8y agoCO2 production is not the only environmental harm. You're being pretty uncharitable by presenting that crowd as hysterical but not addressing their actual arguments against cattle farming.
- village-idiot 8y agoIt's hard not to be uncharitable to people who claimed that meat production produced more CO2 than cars, which is insane, and also completely false. I also find the methane argument interesting, but not convincing. For certain methane production from cows isn't nothing, but it's not like we haven't seen masses of bovine like animals on this continent before. There's about 94m cows in America today, which is a lot, but not in excess of the 50m-100m Bison that inhibited the continent before we killed them all. The Bison did not warm the earth, and presumably they farted. There are for certain problems with grazing cattle in some ways, especially in countries where they're cutting down forests for grazing room (looking at you, Brazil). I'm not saying that we should just ignore everything and keep on as is. I'm just fed up with people imagining that the solution to global warming is the crazy moonshot plans (let's milk spiders!) rather than the boring incremental stuff (walk more, focus on effective land/animal management). The EPA for their part recommends more judicious use of fertilizers, using higher quality pastures, and more careful manure management as the path to reducing CO2 emissions from agriculture.
- codeisawesome 8y agoWhat percentage of methane, btw, which is a much stronger greenhouse gas?
- village-idiot 8y ago
- felipemnoa 8y ago>>Once you get past the squeamishness We have no qualms about eating stuff vomited by insects (honey, although technically not vomit but still) or large looking insects (lobsters, although technically not an insect but in the same family). Humans will eat virtually anything as long as it tastes good.
- taf2 8y agopass the salt shaker?
- DonHopkins 8y agoStarbucks Halloween Pumpkin Spice Spidermilk Latte!
- avip 8y agoYou dropped the /s there.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- xyzzy123 8y agoI’m finding it hard to get past the squeam. A bit of fermi estimation puts spider requirements in the megaton range. Suppose you wanted to replace just milk drunk by humans in the U.S. Say 100 megalitres per day (roughly). Suppose a spider produces say 2% of bodymass as milk per day. Under that assumption we need on the order of 5 * 10^9 kg or 5 megatons of spiders. The following article estimates the current spider population of the world at just 25 megatons. https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/03/the-amount-of-food-spiders-eat-each-year-will-haunt-you-for-the-rest-of-your-life/ https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/03/the-amount-of-food-spider... Now I’m slightly haunted by the idea of a megaton scale “spider farm”. Also your comment is an excellent illustration of Poe’s law.
- mchannon 8y agoThere are about 100 million cattle in the US today. Assuming 75% are fully grown and the remainder weightless, that comes in at 75 million tons of cattle. I have no trouble visualizing 75 million tons of cattle, so why is it so challenging to visualize 5 million tons of milking spiders? Setting up distributed shipping containers to replace centralized dairies and feedlots seems quite easy to me. No need to torture yourself on whether I'm being serious or not. I think it's a nice thought exercise and perhaps even a business model.