Fritz Vollrath from the Oxford University specializes in spider silk and he's here to reiterate that Spider-Man's web-slinging ways are unrealistic in comparison to a real spider's, determining that the silk Spidey produces would not be strong enough to hold his weight.
In the special on-screen edition of the Biochemical Society's magazine, The Biochemist, Vollrath shared his analysis of Spider-Man's activities as compared to how real spiders behave, finding that the Marvel hero's would lose out in strength to what spiders in the real world use.
According to him, silks comprise a diverse group of materials with filaments made by a number of arthropods. They have evolved over the course of 400 million years as protein polymers relying on extrusion spinning to initiate the proper chemical processing pathway that guides dope, the gel-like precursor to silk, to allow the material to self-assemble into a solid fiber.
This makes silk different from other biopolymer protein complexes like cellulose, keratin and collagen, which are formed into tertiary and quaternary structures during the growth process. Instead of being grown, silks are spun using shear-force-fields and flow elongation alongside chemical primers to activate self-assembly at the cellular level.
Vollrath confirmed that Spider-Man shoots filaments from his wrist, after watching videos and brushing up on background visual literature (a.k.a. comics) of the character. Additionally, he concluded that the web-slinger's silk glands must be located in his thorax, given the size of the glands if they are to produce enough silk at least for a day's worth of swinging around.
And though they are both capable of producing double threads thanks to bilateral symmetry, Spider-Man and real spiders differ in that the superhero only shoots from one wrist at a time while the arachnids always produce double threads.
Vollrath said double threads are important because they are a safety feature, with two threads stronger together although each is capable of supporting the producer's weight. Still, he is amazed that Spider-Man has managed to survive even with the apparent lack of safety margins, which led him to assume that another quality control system is in place near or by the web-crawler's wrist or the duct connecting the wrist-nozzle to the silk gland.
Given Vollrath's assessments, it would appear that other than producing web as well, Spider-Man is actually not that similar to a real spider. Maybe Spidey should consider a name-change?
A standalone "Spider-Man" movie is set for a 2017 release.
