Alternate Silk: Is the Mulberry Silkworm really the only plausible silk-producing domesticate?

I’m jealous of you, though. I have a thing for moths. Have you ever seen their cocoons? If so, how did they feel? The material feel like it was going to be easy to work with, or no?

Sorry to say, my only encounters with any member of Lepidoptera is limited to gardening, and usually ends in a squish. Only I may eat my cabbages, no invertebrates allowed.

Which Greek moths? That's my problem. Is it all of them including Saturnia pyri? I also imagine there's a little bit of variation between populations in terms of cocoon quality. But, I think you're right. My POD is 5,500 years ago, and in that time I should be able to justify the butterflies of an alternate Indo-European migration making their way out to Iberia with enough time to come up with a finer silk through selective breeding ("Say! This is a really nice cocoon! It's so soft! And look at those fibers. We're not boiling this one. Nope! This one gets to breed!").

Actually, at this POD, you probably wouldn't need to change much. Large moths were common all across Europe and Noth Africa. Also, breeding for a silk production bug boi would be surprisingly easy, bees had already enjoyed a lot of breeding experiments by this point, and that was for far more nebulous qualities, such as behaviour and selectiveness in nectar collection, but they went extraordinarily well, considering the limited amount of scientific knowledge available to breeders.
 
Was thinking about this topic the other day, but could Antheraea polyphemus, the Polyphemus moth, be a possibility for an alternate silk producing insect? In part, it feeds on oak trees (Quercus), which were an important source of food (acorns) by the American Indians of California and southern Oregon. The same genus Antheraea contains several species which are used to produce tussar silk in India, China, and Japan. Considering the ancient date of sericulture in China and the importance of Quercus species to the American Indians of these places, I wonder how domesticated we could get this moth to be? Although it's often stated that California/PNW Indians were not agricultural peoples, they did cultivate a species of tobacco as far north as Alaska, so there's certainly some concepts already there, as well as the pre-existing concepts of managing oak trees. It could just be a natural outgrowth of the silviculture being practiced in indigenous California. Wild silk wasn't unknown in the Americas, since in Mesoamerica some silk moths were used to make fabrics.

Outside explorers of California from the Spanish onwards would easily recognise this as a sort of silk, which would give an interesting dynamic to colonisation of the area. It could even be beneficial for the local Indians, since no point in killing/ethnically cleansing them if they have the secret as to how to farm these trees for the local silk.
 
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