Brown cows may not actually make chocolate milk, but pink silkworms
do produce pink skeins of silk, a team of scientists has discovered. To
see if they could produce pre-dyed silk—silk that comes colored,
straight from the source—the team fed ordinary silkworms mulberry leaves
that had been sprayed with fabric dyes. Out of seven tested dyes, only
one worked, producing a thread that reminded me of
pink-dyed hair.
And
yes, the worms themselves take on some color before they weave their
silk cocoons. Their colorful diets did not affect their growth, the
team, which included engineers and biologists from the CSIR-National
Chemical Laboratory in India,
reports in the journal
ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.
(The researchers didn't look too deeply into how the dyes affected the
silkworms' health. After all, silkworms die when people harvest their
silk.)