The spider lady Nan Songer and her arachnid WW II army

Penny Parker Klostermann

Sound recording - 2025

Venomous spiders, delicate silk, and science experiments filled Nan Songer's days and nights, her home in California overflowed with many-legged critters. With inspiration from a friend, Nan began to study how spider silk could be harvested. The finely woven material spiders used to create webs was much stronger than it looked, and Nan was eager to unlock its potential and hopefully help her country at the same time. At the height of WWII, she studied different spiders before landing on the poisonous black widow as the perfect spider to experiment with. Their strong silk could be used for crosshairs on rifles, which Nan used to fill massive orders for the US military. Despite the danger posed by black widows, Nan wasn't deterred--...she wanted to play her part. Using a device she built for extracting silk, Nan humanely used it on the deadly spiders to get both extra fine and super heavy silk. more