Trivia Arachnophilic Optics

[Crypto Pitt]

The famous "crosshairs" you see every time you squint through a riflescope are, these days, usually painstakingly painted on by hand. However, it wasn't always that way. Historically, the material used to make precision optics user-friendly was spider silk—specifically, the silk from female black widow spiders. Why the black widow? Its silk is actually many times stronger than the silk produced by other, less venomous spiders. In fact, the black widow spider produces a thread that is pound-for-pound as strong as Kevlar. That made it perfect for withstanding the force produced by even the most high-powered of firearms. Many optics manufacturers employed one or more people whose sole job was the care and feeding of their captive widows (the going rate was two flies a week). This was actually much tougher on the spiders than it was on the people who handled them: Like most venomous spiders, black widows are fairly mellow critters who only bite humans under provocation...but the burden of constantly producing silk reduced their natural life span by two-thirds.