A short note in Nature on wild silk-producing insects of West Africa. It describes how cocoons of Anaphe infracta and A. venata are boiled, spun and mixed with native cotton yarn to weave "Sanyan" cloth in Nigerian towns such as Ibadan and Ilorin. It also covers the white "Gambari" (Haussa) silk from northern Nigeria, the author's experiment producing white cocoons by confining larvae in the dark, and notes on larval food plants and the classification of other Anaphe species.