How Much Silk Can A Silk Moth Produce?

Silkmoths are members of the family Saturniidae. A single cocoon from a silk moth produces between 800 and 100 metres of continuous silk thread. This seems like a lot but an enormous number  - about 50 000 – silkworms are killed to make one kilogram of raw silk. Each year, a million million silkworms perish in order to supply people with the amount of silk they want to buy. If a silkworm eats about five kilograms of mulberry leaves, it can make enough silk to spin into a thread more than 100 miles long.

Apart from laying the eggs that develop into the silkworms that supply the silk industry, silkmoths have very little life left. After years of breeding to reduce their ability to fly off, they can now not fly at all. Even so, silkmoths are one of the largest moths in the world: they have a wingspan of over 30 centimetres.

Silkworm moths have been used to make silk since the reign of the Chinese Empress Si-Ling-Chi, 2000 years ago.