10-27-2010, 10:05 PM | #11 | ||
Join Date: May 2005
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Re: Would a 9 lb sapient spider producing 1/10 lb of silk a day suspend your disbelie
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Spiders can spin silk at a much higher rate each day as they build their webs, but I think they usually eat their webs when they dismantle them so as to reuse the protein. Actually synthesizing the silk protein goes much slower. TeV |
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10-28-2010, 12:25 AM | #12 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Would a 9 lb sapient spider producing 1/10 lb of silk a day suspend your disbelie
Better consider the oxygen factor, too. I'm not sure a 9-lbs spider could even get enough oxygen to function in our current atmosphere, and if its neural tissue is anything like mammalian neural tissue, a sapient spider is going to have a substantial oxygen demand to power whatever it uses for a brain, too.
(There were 'giant insects' and similar in the Carboniferous, but there is reason to to believe that global oxygen levels were substantially higher than today during that Period, as well.) |
10-28-2010, 01:06 AM | #13 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Would a 9 lb sapient spider producing 1/10 lb of silk a day suspend your disbelie
Well, based on the crab it probably can, at least at the metabolic rate of a crab. Not much chance of being sapient at that metabolic rate, though (at least one order of magnitude too low, probably two).
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10-28-2010, 01:56 AM | #14 |
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: Would a 9 lb sapient spider producing 1/10 lb of silk a day suspend your disbelie
I should have written spider like creature. Of course it couldn't be just a scaled up version.
At the TL3 they live, if it looked like a spider that's what they would get called regardless of how far removed they may be genetically. Eight legged, silk producing, fanged, shelled critters would get the moniker whether they liked it or not. |
10-28-2010, 02:31 AM | #15 | |
Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: Oregon
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Re: Would a 9 lb sapient spider producing 1/10 lb of silk a day suspend your disbelie
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10-28-2010, 03:23 AM | #16 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
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Re: Would a 9 lb sapient spider producing 1/10 lb of silk a day suspend your disbelie
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10-28-2010, 03:25 AM | #17 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
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Re: Would a 9 lb sapient spider producing 1/10 lb of silk a day suspend your disbelie
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10-28-2010, 05:16 AM | #18 | |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Canada
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Re: Would a 9 lb sapient spider producing 1/10 lb of silk a day suspend your disbelie
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And they are exoskeletal. Current Earth conditions have no more gravity than the conditions under which we supported nine foot long milipedes - the oxygen is less, but unsurprisingly the larger or more active arthropods have evolved better respiration in the past billion years in response to the reduction in oxygen. Many small arthropods still have very very primitive respiration, but for example tarantulas have quite good "book lungs" instead of spiracles.
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10-28-2010, 05:49 AM | #19 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Would a 9 lb sapient spider producing 1/10 lb of silk a day suspend your disbelie
Another way to look at it, silk is energeticallly in the same general range as making new tissue. So you are looking at something that is effectively about the same as regenerating 1% of its body mass per day. That doesn't sound totally ridiculous, but is going to have a pretty substantial energy cost. It also must get the raw materials from somewhere, so it has to eat an extra 1/10 lb of protiens, over and above whatever it would normally need to live, in order to do that. Normally I'd expect an active 9 lb animal's basic metabolism to run at about 300 Calories, at about 4 Calories per gram for most protiens, the raw materials it needs to sustain this silk production add about the equivalent of another 180 Cal - over a third of its diet (of around 1/2 lb of meat per day) going into silk production may be *unlikely*, particularly for an evolved animal that's also using a bunch of extra energy for its brain, but isn't *totally* ridiculous, certainly no more than fitting enough processing power for sapience into something as small as 9 lbs.
Still, it's probably worth asking yourself what could the wild spiders possibly be using that much silk per day for which is so vital to their survival that evolution wouldn't have done something about that huge energy drain.
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10-28-2010, 06:20 AM | #20 | |
Join Date: Jul 2005
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Re: Would a 9 lb sapient spider producing 1/10 lb of silk a day suspend your disbelie
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