Artisans Angkor
When the worms have grown enough, they are put in baskets. From there, they will spin their cocoons in five days and will produce about three hundreds meters of silk each. The cocoons are then put in sunlight to avoid them undergoing their metamorphosis into mature moths. However, 20% of them reach the breeding process and the female moths will lay and hatch its eggs within nine to twelve days.
The cocoons are soaked in hot water in order to soften the sericin (also known as silk gum) which coat the fibres and stick the cocoons together. Silk threads are then unwound and reeled together to produce a single thread. Weavers at Angkor Silk Farm make both raw silk and fine silk that do not have the same texture at all. Sericin has not been completely removed from raw silk threads, which will give a rougher texture to the fabric at the end.
Acorn worm
Acorn worms are dioecious, having separate biological sexes, although at least some species are also capable of asexual reproduction. They have paired gonads, which lie close to the pharynx and release the gametes through a small pore near to the gill slits. The female lays a large number of eggs embedded in a gelatinous mass of mucus, which are then externally fertilized by the male before water currents break up the mass and disperse the individual eggs.
In most species, the eggs hatch into planktonic larvae with elongated bodies covered in cilia. In some species, these develop directly into adults, but in others, there is a free-swimming intermediate stage referred to as a "tornaria" larva. These are very similar in appearance to the bipinnaria larvae of starfishes, with convoluted bands of cilia running around the body. Since the embryonic development of the blastula within the egg is also very similar to that of echinoderms, this suggests a close phylogenetic link between the two groups.