The Weavers: The Curious World of Insects

INTRODUCTION

THE ANCIENT WORLD

OF SILK

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

– John Keats

The word ‘silk’ conjures up images of luminescent fabric and exquisite brocade from Kancheepuram, Benares, China or Japan. It brings to mind silk ties and soft purses, warm shawls and fashionable stoles; but few ever think of the producers of the silk – the original weavers – the silk moths. Yet, silk binds humans and insects in this fine fibrous relationship.

THE DISCOVERY OF SILK – ENTERTAINING MYTHS & FACTS

Archaeological evidence tells us that humans have probably known about or used silk since the Neolithic period. At the Neolithic site of Yǎngsháo wénhuà in Hsia county of Shansi province, China, a silk cocoon of the moth Rondotia menciana, Moore, bearing sharp knife cuts has been discovered and it dates back to 2200–1700 BC. Silk scraps dating back to approximately 2750 BC have been found at another Neolithic site – Chi’ien-shangyan, Chêkiang province. Fossil evidence shows however, that insects have used silk for millions of years, and in forms that scientists are only now beginning to unwind.

The discovery of silk is, historically, culturally and economically, a significant event for humans. It is also replete with myths and legends. Although the Chinese are credited with discovering silk, when and by whom is still a matter of debate. Popular legends date this discovery to the third millennium BC (2698–2598 BC) during the reign of Huang-Ti, the famous Yellow Emperor – a ruler of a kind and a patron of art and philosophy among other things. Among the many stories of his reign is a delightful one of a cocoon in a tea cup – a storm of a kind!

The emperor’s principal wife, Xi Ling-Shi, was once taking her tea near a mulberry tree. As she watched the caterpillars on the tree, her attention was distracted by a cocoon that fell into her teacup. While fishing it out, the queen noticed a slender thread separate from the casing. Pulling at it, she began to unwind the cocoon and soon called her attendants to the task. Together, they unravelled fibre of such sheen that the queen had it woven into a robe for her husband. Much impressed with the cloth, Emperor Huang-Ti encouraged her to explore it further. According to the Shih-Chi (Record of the Historian), Xi Ling-Shi is said to have established the processes for rearing cocoons and extracting silk. She is also credited with inventing the looms that spun it into cloth. Lady Xi Ling-Shi (or Hsi-ling as she is also known) became honoured, or rather resurrected, as the first sericulturist and began to be worshipped as the Silk Goddess during the Northern Zhou dynasty (557–581 AD).

It is an endearing legend, but according to Dr Dieter Kuhn, Professor Emeritus of Sinology at the University of Würzburg, Germany, while archaeological and written evidence show that silk was used in China during Neolithic times, doubts persist over the legitimacy of the legend. He points to the encyclopaedic work, the Huai Nan Tzu, compiled under the direction of Liu An, Prince of Huai-nan in the second century BC, for differing evidence about the origin of silk goddesses. Liu An was a patron of the arts and philosophy and was the paternal uncle of the Han emperor, Wu. From an account left by this prince, it is known that Po Yu, an officer in the court of the Yellow Emperor, was the first to make silk garments. Po Yu spun and manipulated the warps with his hand to make cloth out of silk; the looms appeared several generations later. The legend about the first sericulturist, according to Dr Kuhn has its origin in a system of pre-Yüan folk belief. Thus, Xi Ling-Shi may not have been the first to discover silk, much less over a cup of tea!

The Silk Goddesses

Though Xi Ling-Shi may not have discovered silk first, and though she may have been accepted as the silk goddess during the Northern Chou dynasty, by 1742, she was officially recognized as the First Sericulturist, a patron saint, worthy of worship at the altar. She was not the only one. Some accounts give six and others eight goddesses of silk. The most interesting belief comes from a rural folktale of how silk came to be – from The Horse Head woman.

How the horse became the silkworm

This charming legend has many versions. The tale presented here is retold from the book Sou-shên-chi or Legends of the Supernatural.

In the Szechwan province, sometime around 4 AD, a young girl was left to fend for herself when military duties called her father away to distant lands. Her only companion then was a stallion, and though she was poor, she took good care of him. As the years went by and her father failed to return, she worried about him more and more. In all this time, the horse remained her only friend, quietly listening as she spoke to him about her fears. One such day, as she spoke to the horse, she promised to marry him if only he would bring back her father. Upon hearing these words, the stallion galloped away, looked for her father and eventually found him. The father was both astonished and happy to see the horse. He noticed that it continually whinnied, throwing its head in the direction of his home. Thinking that perhaps something was wrong at home or with his daughter, he mounted the steed and headed back immediately.

Father and daughter were thus reunited as a family once more. Pleased with the horse, the father fed him generously with sweet-smelling hay and fresh grass, but the horse refused to eat. Whenever he saw the girl, he reared up and tried to strike her. This strange behaviour could hardly go unnoticed and soon the father called the girl aside for an explanation and discovered the truth of her promise. Thinking that it would bring disgrace to their family, the father counselled her to keep the matter a secret. To be on the safe side, he shot the horse with an arrow, skinned it and hung the hide out to dry.

Upon seeing the hide, the girl decided to give it away to her friend. Just before doing so, she stamped upon it hard and said, ‘How dare a horse, a beast, think he could marry a human!’ At this, the hide rose from the ground, wrapped itself around the girl and flew away. Frightened out of her wits, the friend ran to the girl’s father and told him of the incident. Together, they went in search of the girl and finally found her and the horsehide on a large tree – in the form of silkworms that were spinning copious amounts of the finest silk. The friend brought down the silkworms and cared for them. In sadness, she called the tree ‘Sang’ – a word which in Ancient Chinese stood for both, the mulberry tree and mourning for the dead.

Subsequent stories seem to be extensions of this one, culminating in the girl becoming the Horse-head silkworm goddesses, portrayed in paintings. The Chinese and Japanese believe that when silkworms spin silk they nod their ‘heads’ just like the horses. Dieter Kuhn believes these fairytales have their origins in rural communities that are involved in farming silk.

Whatever the origin, the Chinese guarded their knowledge of silk closely for almost 2,500 years. An imperial decree made the sharing of information about silk production punishable by death. As a result, legends on how the information reached other countries are just as charming as the product itself.

The princess and her wedding crown

Hotan is an oasis town along the southern edge of the Taklamakan desert in western China. This delightful story occurred at a time when Hotan (Khotan) was the capital city of the ancient Kingdom of Khotan. Located on the Silk Road, Khotan connected China with the opulent cultures of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and with traders from the Greek and Byzantine empires. It was a flourishing centre for exchange of goods. The king of Khotan was therefore quite keen to produce silk.

In the early third century AD, the Chinese had a difficult time maintaining their control over these oases as they were ruled by several nomadic dynasties. Political marriages were therefore a convenient way to hold territories together. For the oasis kingdom, such marriages brought access to much desired tradable materials. Around 440 AD, a Chinese princess of the Han dynasty was given in marriage to the king of Khotan at the latter’s request. The king secretly sent a message to the princess that there was no silk in Khotan and if she wanted it, she would have to bring it with her. The princess could not bear to live without her beautiful silk garments. As she set out for her husband’s home, she hid silkworm cocoons and mulberry seeds in her elaborate wedding headdress. The guards at the border, on orders from the Chinese emperor, searched her belongings before she departed, but did not dare touch her crown. She also took with her three maids who were well-versed in sericulture. The king of Khotan was delighted. A painting plaque discovered in 1900-01 by Dr Stein during his excavation at Dandan-oilik, a deserted oasis town in China, depicts the princess with silkworm cocoons in her hairdo.

In the oral tradition preserved in Khotan, this story is told somewhat differently. The king of Khotan told the princess that instead of gold, gems or pearls, she should bring with her mulberry seeds, silkworm eggs and skilled people to produce silk cloth. The princess concealed the silkworm eggs in her head-dress, while her maid hid the mulberry seeds among the herbs in the medicine chest. These were not discovered by the cursory search the guards conducted at the border. Receiving her at Khotan, the King’s minister questioned her about the absence of men trained to producing silk. The princess informed him that in China, the entire process of breeding silkworms, extracting silk and spinning it into cloth was women’s work and girls learned it at a young age.

Monks at the Byzantine court

It was not just princesses who brought silk to other cultures. There are stories about monks who were also responsible for the dispersal of information and materials related to silk. During the reign of Emperor Justinian, there was an enormous demand for silk in Byzantium. Silk – raw or woven – was not merely a status symbol or style statement, it was used as currency. It was given as dowries, used in place of money to pay salaries and taxes, gifted to visiting dignitaries, and even exchanged for good horses. Silk in those times was valued as equal to, or more than gold.

Two monks from India, belonging to the Nestorian church, promised the emperor that they would help him establish silk production. According to Procopis, a Byzantine historian, the monks visited China and learned the entire process of making silk, from rearing silkworms to spinning the cloth. With the aid of their contacts, they obtained silkworm eggs and larvae, which they carefully hid inside their bamboo staffs, thus simply walking them into Byzantium. How they managed to grow mulberry trees is not entirely clear, but they seem to have managed to rear the larvae from the eggs. This is how the process of silk production appears to have spread to Istanbul, and to the West.

The history of silk in insects

Silk from the silkworm moth Bombyx mori may have caught the fancy of humans across the ages, yet these tales cannot match in magnitude or grandeur the tale of insect silk that labs around the globe are now learning to read. This tale lies scattered across insect behaviour, metabolism, life history and most importantly in their genes; it documents a far more versatile story of production, spinning and use.

There are twenty-three different categories of silk in the insect world, each supposedly a result of independent evolutionary events. (Compare this with early human societies that vied for the knowledge and trade routes of just one category of silk from just one type of moth.) The twenty-three types of silk have not only had individual origins, but are different in properties and functions. At least four different types of silk-secreting glands are known to exist among insects. It is worth noting here that spider silk is not part of this story. The spider is not an insect, though it belongs to the same phylum as insects, namely Arthropoda. The story here is about insect silk, which has in no small measure contributed to the dominance of insects in nature.

The complex history of insect silk may be understood by beginning with its most familiar form. The silk we are all familiar with is produced by the larva of the moth Bombyx mori. The silkworm is not a real worm; it is the caterpillar of moths belonging to the family Bombycidae. Moths are closely related to butterflies and both fall under the insect order, Lepidoptera.

According to scientists David Grimaldi and Michael S. Engel, Lepidopterans, i.e., butterflies and moths, last diversified from their ancestral groups 100–66 MYA. There is no evidence so far to show that silk was being produced by their ancestors before this point, or that glands such as the labial or salivary glands were used to spin silk.

The earliest evidence of silk-spinning behaviour is seen in the members of the ancestral group known as the Neo-Lepidoptera, which shares several features with the modern-day Lepidoptera. In terms of evolutionary history, modern-day moths and butterflies evolved during the late Triassic period 250-135 MYA; the earliest fossils of Saturniids (a family of moths) indicate that silk moths arose between the late Tertiary and early Cretaceous, 150 MYA. The silk that humans discovered only 5,000 years back came into being 150 million years ago!

Features of silk

We know why humans value it, but why is silk so special to insects? To understand this, we start by reorienting our ideas of silk. Dr Craig who has worked extensively with insect silk defines it as ‘[…] fibrous proteins containing highly repetitive sequences of amino acids … stored in the animal as a liquid and configure[d] into fibres when sheared or spun at secretion.’

Fibrous proteins are found in all animals. We have them in our muscles and connective tissues, and they function within our body. In insects, fibrous proteins assume many molecular avatars to carry out functions that lie outside their bodies.

Silk filaments are made of a fibrous protein called fibroin, secreted by insect glands as a gel that scientists like to call silk dope. The predominant amino acid residues in these semi-crystalline proteins are glycine, alanine and serine. Additional residues and/or other compounds are made by the glands and added to the silk to confer the required properties. This creates great diversity in insect silk.

Silk is made up of multiple filaments and insect glands secrete the protein sericin to glue the filaments together. In some cases, proteins of smaller sizes are also produced – these are not necessary to the silk’s structure, but are important in protecting it from predators, microbes and moulds. As is typical of proteins, the fibres fold to form secondary and tertiary structures with specific properties that bestow a variety of survival and evolutionary advantages on insects.

The fibres of moth cocoons are solid. But inside the silkworm’s body, these proteins are produced and stored as a semi-liquid, jelly-like material – the silk dope. When it comes in contact with the environment it polymerizes into insoluble solid fibres, to be used as needed.

For science buffs who want more details, the last chapter of this book deals with the chemistry of insect silk. For now, let’s delve into the wonderful world of insect silk straightaway. I begin with the insects whose silk is most familiar to us, the one that humans have cared about and squabbled over for centuries – the silkworm.

LEPIDOTERA

THE FAMILIAR

WEAVERS

Butterflies and moths which belong to this insect order are quite familiar insects. Lepidoptera means ‘scaly-winged’. The wings of these insects have scales that reflect light thereby producing those colours we so admire. If you have touched a butterfly’s wing, you would have noticed a powdery residue in your