Peter Parker Meet Billy Goat Gruff

At tonight's educational and hilarious Physics of Superheroes lecture by U of M professor James Kakalios, I learned something more shocking than Superman's weight on Krypton (3300 pounds) or why Spiderman accidentally snapped his girlfriend Gwen Stacy's neck while attempting to stop her fall from the George Washington Bridge (he stopped her fall too quickly). I learned that scientists are taking spider genes and putting them into goat eggs to enable them to produce spider silk. A goat given this gene will secrete spider silk into its milk, which then can be isolated and used to make any number of existing products hundreds of times stronger, such as tennis rackets, fishing lines, and even body armor.

So, why don't they just use spider silk instead of producing goats that are 1/70,000th spider? Because spiders are too aggressive to be easily and economically farmed. While "spidergoats" can live cheaply and peacefully amongst each other, each farmed spider would need its own little abode to avoid a lot of intraspecies murders. Basically, a spider would take up more room than a goat. I told you spiders were evil.