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Comment by mchannon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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There 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.

> There is no reason to suspect that this would be useful for human nutrition

Do spiders have some kind of different macronutrients?

I 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.)

It 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

> 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.

Milk is explicitly defined as coming from mammary glands in mammals.

How are mammals defined?

phylogenetically[0]

[0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Browser/wwwtax.cgi?mod...

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?

Except we also use the term in connection with almonds, coconuts, and soybeans and we don't have to act like it's hard to understand.

It's different and coconut milk is as much milk as a seahorse is a horse, it's just a word.

And if people discuss seahorses, do you give them the biological definition of horse?

That’s because of modern branding, some places don’t allow those to be called milk, you can’t call it milk in the EU unless it comes from animal sources for example.

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.

> I do doubt that this would be as nutritious to humans as milk from cows or other mammals.

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.

Not all proteins are the same.

Also keep in mind that it took humans some time of evolution to be able to digest cow milk.

And that the majority of people on earth are still lactose intolerant.

That’s a relative issue: “People are usually able to drink at least one cup of milk per sitting without developing significant symptoms, with greater amounts tolerated if drunk with a meal or throughout the day.”

This is because most people produce some lactase it’s more a question on quantity of milk consumed.

Not really.

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.

The idea of referring to things that look like milk as milk is much older than those examples. Consider, Milkweed which produces something that looks like cows but is a very different substance. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asclepias

Not to mention the Milky Way.

> Milk is what you get when milking an animal.

No, sometimes you get venom.

https://www.jobmonkey.com/uniquejobs/snake-milker/

I should have included previous "milking spiders" for venom.

https://www.terminix.com/blog/science-nature/milking-spiders... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIJ_sVwVhpQ

I don’t think you realistically can milk a spider.

...another sentence I never thought I’d say.

Same problem with spider silk. An awesome material but slightly difficult to harvest on an industrial scale.

Can'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)

What’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?

They don't matter very much here because unlike cows, spiders probably can't experience suffering.

It’s called being a human. We are intelligent apex predators who exploit everything we possibly can.

For 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).

And of course our skill at exploiting other animals for sustenance is nothing compared to that of parasites.

Honeypot ants farm their own, interesting.

With an emphasis on predators.

Let's not engineer bigger spiders, please

>> 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.

That wouldn't work due to the cube-square law. Spiders can't even get enough oxygen at cow sizes due to their book lungs.

Pump pure oxygen into the grow-domes.

You are only making them look more awesome by suggesting attached oxygen tanks.

World: We need a solution to climate change!

HN: Ok, picture this - gigantic, genetically engineered, milkable tarantulas!

I’m actually proud of how far along this sub thread people have kept a straight face!

We were so worried about what we could do, that we didn't consider what we should do.

- Anon, before the tarantula massacre

Lol, this made my day :D

likely 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.

Oh you can milk anything with nipples.

> 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.

Clearly, the solution is to breed really big spiders and then milk them.

Or, 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.

CO2 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.

It'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.

What percentage of methane, btw, which is a much stronger greenhouse gas?

Hard to tell. Methane dissipates very rapidly, making it hard to tell exactly where it came from.

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.

>>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.

pass the salt shaker?

I’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-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.

There 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.

You dropped the /s there.

Starbucks Halloween Pumpkin Spice Spidermilk Latte!

You’re making a ton of assumptions. Maybe the milk of mammals is more nutritious to mammals than spider “milk” would be.

You just wanted to fill our minds with the concept of spider cheese.

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