How does a silkworm make a cocoon?
Answers
Answer:
After 20-33 days of constantly munching away at Mulberry leaves or chow, your Silkworm will feel the urge to cocoon. Lava that are ready to cocoon will be noticeable to the human eye, as they will appear translucent and yellowish in colour. Just before it begins cocooning, the Silkworm will excrete a runny fluid in order to clean out its system and prepare it for the last stage of its life-cycle. It will then ooze a tiny drop of Silk for anchoring, before going on to draw one long, continuous filament of Silk by swinging its head to-and-fro. This process can take up to 48 hours for the Silkworm to fully complete, and the result will be a perfectly ovate cocoon, with one continuous strand of silk up to 1 kilometre long! Inside the cocoon, the Silkworm will moult for the last time, as it approaches the last stage of its life-cycle to become a moth. Sometimes Silkworms do funny things, and this is evident when a Silkworm decides to spin a cocoon with a friend! When this happens, the cocoon will be noticeably larger, however, if the two are members of the opposite sex, sometimes the cocoon does not hatch – and you will open it to find two dead Silk-Moths and a bunch of eggs inside the cocoon!
Answer:
Most of us are familiar with silk as a fine fabric that is made into neckties and dresses. As a textile, silk is highly valued because it is shiny and smooth, strong yet lightweight, and it can be easily dyed or treated to take on the color or chemical properties of other substances. These well-known properties led scientists to develop new products from silk, including important medical materials such as replacement cartilage, surgical sutures, and small spheres that can be used to deliver drugs to certain parts of the body (not all of these are available yet on the market). What many people do not realize is that the small silk fibers that give silk its desirable characteristics come from the mouths of caterpillars called silkworms.