Scientists discover spider species that feeds its young milk
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
...another sentence I never thought I’d say.
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)
What about the consequences affecting the animals themselves from all those fattening antibiotics, being chained up or whatever?
And of course our skill at exploiting other animals for sustenance is nothing compared to that of parasites.
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.
HN: Ok, picture this - gigantic, genetically engineered, milkable tarantulas!
- Anon, before the tarantula massacre
> We suggest this milk might have evolved from trophic eggs, unviable eggs functioning as a food for newly emerged offspring
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.
[0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Browser/wwwtax.cgi?mod...
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?
Which is why almond, soy etc. would be called almond or soy drink in the EU you can’t even advertise it as a milk substitute.
From the article: containing nearly four times the protein of cow’s milk
And we needn't get into how "coconut milk", "almond milk", etc. are somehow inappropriate uses of "milk" despite their entry into the lexicon millennia ago.
Also keep in mind that it took humans some time of evolution to be able to digest cow milk.
This is because most people produce some lactase it’s more a question on quantity of milk consumed.
All human babies have a much greater propensity to be able to digest lactose than adult humans.
Whey and casein are the dominant proteins, and lactose the dominant carbohydrate, in both human and cow milk.
Humans and cows aren’t that different. All mammals have quite a lot in common.
Not to mention the Milky Way.
No, sometimes you get venom.
https://www.terminix.com/blog/science-nature/milking-spiders... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIJ_sVwVhpQ
Do spiders have some kind of different macronutrients?
(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.)
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.
Meat/Dairy only makes up 3.6% of America’s CO2 budget, far less than the “meat is killing the planet!!1!” crowd claims.
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.
For my part, I have a very hard time imagining that cow farts, which come from carbon already in the fast carbon cycle, are worse than the amount of natural gas that escapes from our wells and old distribution systems.
It’s also important to note that well managed pastures sequester carbon, which is relevant here.
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.
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-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.
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.
Does the species have a name? I'd like to read more about this spider but I don't know what to search for.
No need for that pesky Mammal superclass
I think they come up short on a couple other requirements.