Welcome to our comprehensive Tarantula Feeding Guide! Our aim is to assist you in providing the best possible care for your pet tarantula by offering essential tips and feeding recommendations. Tarantulas are fascinating creatures that require a unique feeding process, and understanding their specific dietary needs is crucial to their overall health and well-being.
Natural Feeding Habits of Tarantulas
Before we delve into the specifics of tarantula feeding, it’s important to understand their natural feeding habits. Tarantulas are carnivorous creatures and predominantly consume insects in the wild. They are opportunistic feeders, meaning they typically wait for prey to come within their reach before striking. Tarantulas tend to hunt at night, using their keen sense of touch and sight to locate prey. Tarantula feeding habits play a crucial role in their well-being, and it’s important to provide a suitable feeding environment for your pet tarantula.
Establishing a Tarantula Feeding Schedule
Establishing a regular tarantula feeding schedule is essential for maintaining your pet’s health and overall well-being. The frequency of feeding your tarantula may vary depending on its species, age, and size.
Factors Influencing Feeding Frequency
- Species-Specific Requirements: Each tarantula species has different feeding requirements.
- Age and Size: Young tarantulas may need to be fed more frequently than adult tarantulas. As a general guideline, you should feed your tarantula once or twice a week. However, some species may require more or less frequent feedings.
- Prey Type: Tarantulas consume live insects, such as crickets, mealworms, and roaches. It’s essential to choose the right size prey for your tarantula to avoid injury or choking.
- Individual Habits: Each tarantula has its own feeding habits. Some may prefer to hunt their own prey, while others may have no interest in hunting.
- Hygiene: It’s crucial to keep your tarantula’s feeding area clean to prevent the buildup of bacteria and fungi, which could cause infections.
By following these guidelines, you can create a healthy and tailored tarantula feeding schedule for your pet.
Best Practices for Feeding Your Tarantula
Feeding your tarantula can be a daunting task, but following best practices will ensure the safety and health of your beloved pet.
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Handling and Preparing Prey Items
Always use tweezers to handle prey items, never your fingers.
Feeding Techniques
For live prey, place the insect directly into the enclosure or use feeding tongs to move the prey in a natural manner.
Proper Care During and After Feeding
After feeding, remove any uneaten prey to prevent it from harming your tarantula.
Tarantula Diet: What Do Tarantulas Eat?
Tarantulas are carnivorous arachnids that consume a variety of prey in the wild. The type of prey they eat varies depending on the species, but common options include insects, small rodents, and even other spiders.
Types of Prey
- Live insects, such as crickets, mealworms, and roaches.
- Pre-killed prey.
- Canned food.
Prey Size
It is important to choose appropriately sized prey items for your tarantula. Too large or too small prey can result in injury or death to your tarantula.
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Tips for Feeding Your Pet Tarantula
Feeding your pet tarantula can be a challenging experience, particularly for beginners.
- Understand Proper Prey Size: Based on the species and size of your tarantula, it is important to choose the appropriate prey size.
- Use Feeding Tongs: To prevent accidents and keep your hands away from your tarantula’s fangs, it is recommended to use feeding tongs or forceps.
- Provide Fresh Water: A freshwater dish should always be available to your tarantula, especially after feeding. While tarantulas do not drink water directly, they can obtain moisture from the food they consume. Therefore, it is not necessary to provide a water bowl specifically for drinking.
- Avoid Disturbing Your Tarantula: Always give your tarantula enough space and time to finish its meal undisturbed.
How to Feed a Tarantula
The best way to feed a tarantula is by using live prey or pre-killed prey. Offer the prey item to your tarantula using tongs or forceps, allowing them to sense and strike at the prey. Avoid using your hands to prevent accidental bites or injuries. When feeding your tarantula, it’s important to handle prey items with care to avoid injuring yourself or the tarantula. Use tongs or forceps to offer prey, as tarantulas may mistake your hand for food and bite accidentally.
Feeding Frequency
The frequency of feeding depends on the species, age, and size of your tarantula. In general, adult tarantulas can be fed once a week, while younger or growing tarantulas may require more frequent feeding, such as every 3 to 5 days.
Recognizing Hunger
If your tarantula is hungry, they will display certain behaviors, such as increased activity and responsiveness to prey. They may also signal hunger by webbing or drumming their legs on the substrate.
Food Refusal
It is not uncommon for tarantulas to occasionally refuse food, especially during molting or when they are stressed. Tarantulas will often refuse food during premolt, and some species will fast for long periods of time. When a T isn’t eating, don’t keep dropping bugs in with it every day. Instead, wait a week or two, drop in a prey item, and watch to see if there is any interest. If the T doesn’t eat, take the item out and try again in another week.
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Common Feeder Insects for Tarantulas in Captivity
Tarantulas primarily eat live insects in the wild. Common prey items for pet tarantulas include crickets, mealworms, roaches, and waxworms. It is important to provide a varied diet to ensure proper nutrition.
Bugs as the Most Practical, Cost-Effective, Nutritious, Safe, and Ethical Option
Bugs are most common for tarantulas in captivity and are thought to be the most practical, cost-effective, nutritious, safe, and ethical. These “feeders” can be found at local pet shops (even some mainstream ones will at least have one kind of these bugs), or they can be ordered and shipped from a reputable breeder of feeders.
Personal Experience With Different Feeders
I’ve had my tarantula Spidey, a chilean rose hair, since 2013 and I’ve tried a few different feeders before settling on dubia cockroaches. I first started out with crickets, and didn’t have much of a great experience. I realized that crickets were hard to keep alive even when regularly giving them food - they had a high rate of cannibalism even when well fed, and often died in a few days despite my efforts to keep them alive until Spidey could eat them all. The crickets were also noisy and smelly, which was not fun. Fortunately, Spidey had a hard time catching the crickets anyway, so I ended up changing her feeders to superworms.
Superworms (basically big mealworms) come in a variety of sizes. She is a big girl (adult) and so she got some juicy ones. Because they were slower than the crickets, Spidey had an easier time getting them so feedings became a little easier (just a LITTLe easier, she would still let them get away sometimes!). I found the mealworms to be a little easier to keep alive than crickets, but it seemed the most they would stay alive for was 2-3 weeks if I was lucky. Considering that Spidey loves to fast for weeks at a time, this was inconvenient. The superworms, although silent, were also very stinky and gross. And I was NOT happy when they would get away from Spidey, because they would burrow and make a gross mess of her substrate if I couldn’t grab them in time.
There are a lot of different varieties of cockroaches, I use dubias because they were the kind my local exotics shop, Ill Exotics, had and Spidey likes them. Roaches are what I had the most success with for many reasons - they don’t burrow, they are slow enough for Spidey to get them, they don’t smell, and they live for a long time without much effort by me. Oh, AND they reproduce quickly, allowing me to grow a colony that sustains itself so I don’t have to get feeders too often. I have had my roaches for over a year now and only have one die occasionally. All they need are some produce scraps and you can leave them for days. They are very hardy. This was also a very convenient solution when I got Blinky, my baby Arizona blonde sling, because I was able to give Blinky the tiny baby roaches that came from Spideys roaches that reproduced.
Overall, I’ve had the best response from my tarantulas with roaches, and I’ve also found them to be more practical for many reasons.
Important Note: Sourcing Feeders
Just as a side note - do NOT feed your tarantulas bugs from around your home or outside! Buy them from an actual store that uses safe conditions to breed their bugs so you don’t expose your Ts to pesticides, chemicals, or disease.
Addressing New Tarantula Owner Concerns
Whether you have a dog, a cat, a hamster, or a pot-bellied pig, if you’re a pet owner, you’ve become accustomed to certain standards of care for your wards. For those of us who have kept these more domesticated pets, we are very used to feeding and providing fresh water to our pets daily, often more than once, and having a variety of conveniently-packaged foods available for their consumption. Most of these pet foods come with handy instructions on just how much to feed your pet, dependent upon the size of the animal. No one sells “Tarantula Chow”, and there are a plethora of feeder insect that would make a good meal for your new pet. There are no “portions”, and determining what size item to drop in with your hungry spider can be cause for stress. As for a feeding schedule, some healthy adult species only need to be fed once a week. And if your T doesn’t eat for a while, it is no cause for immediately alarm. Tarantulas don’t come with instructions, and learning some of the rules and tricks around feeding them can be a stressful and tricky endeavor that involves experience and research.
Factors to Consider When Creating a Feeding Schedule
There are a few important points to consider when coming up with a feeding schedule.
Sling? Juvenile? Adult?
Younger tarantulas, like slings and juveniles, are doing a lot of growing and are much more vulnerable than their adult counterparts. Slings are particularly fragile, and keepers report more sudden and unexplained deaths in the sling stage than in adults. In the wild, a spiderling is particularly vulnerable to predators early in life, so it behooves the young T to eat as much as possible as often as possible so it can quickly grow out of this precarious stage. Therefore, most keepers choose to feed their slings as often as they’ll eat. For many, a feeding schedule of every two or three days for slings is perfect.
A lot of folks express concern that they can overfeed a sling. Although some have insisted that a tarantula can become too fat, resulting in organ failure and molting issues, there has been no scientific proof of this, and most keepers believe it to be a myth. Most slings will chow down until they are ready to enter premolt, then they will stop. They will NOT eat until they explode.
Once the tarantula reaches the “juvenile” stage at around 1.5-2″ or so, most keepers ease off on the feeding a bit. A spider of this size is usually out of its fragile sling stage, and growth at this point will slow down a bit. Although you can certainly continue with a more aggressive feeding schedule at this point (see “power feeding” below), it is no longer necessary.
For adult tarantulas, you need to also consider the species before settling on frequency. An adult Grammostola porterie/rosea needs only four or five crickets a month to be healthy. Conversely, an adult Therophosa or Pamphobeteus species would eat that in a single meal a couple times a week. As an example, my 6″ Pamphobeteus antinous female eats five crickets and one 1.5″ dubia roach in a single week. My 6″ female G. porteri, on the other hand, eats four crickets a month. Know the species of T you keep and listen to other keepers about its appetite. If you have questions, ask.
Power Feeding
If you’re around the hobby long enough, you’ll hear folks talk about “power feeding” their tarantulas. Power feeding is when the keeper jacks up the heat and feeds his tarantulas as much as they will eat in order to grow them to maturity faster. This is usually done in an effort to get breedable adults as quickly as possible.
Size of the Feeder
The size of the feeder being given to the tarantula can certainly impact the frequency that you feed the animal. Some keepers choose to feed their specimens smaller prey items more often. Others will offer their Ts much larger insects, then feed them only once a week or so. There is really not any right or wrong way, and the size and schedule comes down to the keeper’s discretion.
Many keepers stress about the size of prey they should offer to their spiders. A rule of thumb many keepers use is that the prey item should be no larger than the abdomen of the tarantula. So, a juvenile with a abdomen length of about 5 mm would likely be comfortable with a pinhead cricket. Personally, I feed my slings and juveniles prey items slightly smaller than the total length of their bodies, and adults I feed items no larger than their abdomens. I’ve found that this works very well for me, although it is by no means law. Again, it comes down to the personal preference of the keeper.
Now, these are just guidelines, and it is okay for keepers to deviate from them. Case in point, some species of Ts will actually only attack smaller prey items. My M. balfouri and H. incei gold juveniles, for example, would only take much smaller prey for the longest time. Even when my balfouri juvies were about 1.75 inches, they would only attack small crickets. Conversely, my P. cancerides juveniles would easily take down sub-adult crickets at that size.
For very small slings (1/4-3/8″ or so) small food can be very difficult to come by. Although B. lateralis roach nymphs can be a good alternative due to their small size, they are not always easy to come by. In these instances, it may be necessary to pre-kill and cut up a larger prey item into a more appropriate size. Although this may sound a bit gross (and, well, it really is!), cutting the leg off of a larger cricket, or cutting a meal worm into smaller pieces is a perfect way to feed your tiny sling. Just carefully place the food chunk in the enclosure and, if the sling is hungry, it will find it. Just be sure to remove any excess the next day, as they may not consume the whole piece.
Number of Prey Items
In the cases of slings and juveniles, I would say one prey item per feeding is completely appropriate. For some adults, dropping in a more than one item can be an appropriate option. Personally, I tend to use larger insects, like dubia roaches, rather than bombard my tarantulas with a half-dozen spastic crickets.
Feeder Options Available
There are many possibilities when deciding what to feed your Ts. Personally, I find the many inverts available as feeders to be quite convenient, and I will often mix up what I feed my spiders to create a more diverse diet.
Invertebrate Feeders
NOTE: Some folks supplement their larger tarantulas’ diets with vertebrates such as mice, geckos, and snakes. Personally, I’m not a fan of this.
Crickets
Crickets have long been the go-to feeder insect in the hobby. They are sold at most pet stores in several sizes that make them a convenient feeder insect for almost any size T, and they can be purchased in bulk for those with large collections. They can also be relatively inexpensive if purchased in large quantities.
TIP: To keep extras alive, use a large critter keeper or modified plastic storage container, provide egg cartons for a hide, and feed dry oats or fish food.
Mealworms
Another readily-available food source for tarantulas. Not only can mealworms be purchased in many different sizes, but they can also be raised rather easily. Unlike other prey items on this list, they can be kept in a refrigerator, meaning you can keep some on hand for when you need them. They are also very easy to reproduce and raise (for a tutorial on how to start a colony, click away!).
Superworms
Like mealworms, superworms are another beetle larvae that can make for a good tarantula feeder. They are relatively inexpensive, and their larger sizes make them a better choice for larger Ts. They can also be raised and bred in colonies for those interested in always keeping some on hand. However, it needs to be mentioned that these worms WILL bite and eat a tarantula.
B. lateralis roaches
Also known as “rusty reds” or “red racers”, these roaches make a wonderful alternative to crickets. They are fast moving, bold little bugs that will stay out in the open rather than dig. Their propensity to explore and move around when dropped into an enclosure makes them a very attractive prey item for Ts. Adults are also a bit larger than crickets, making them a little better for larger Ts. These can be purchased online in bulk, or kept in colonies.
TIP: These are fast little roaches who are quite good at escaping when given the chance.
B. dubia roaches
This tropic roach species can hit sizes of 1.5-2″ making them a great feeder choice for larger tarantulas (I feed most of my large tropical species with B. dubia). They can be purchased as colonies (about $30 shipped), which will produce nymphs of many sizes, providing a food source for slings, juvies, and adults. The one main drawback to this species is that some tarantulas won’t take them.
TIP: This roach will freeze and “play dead” when a tarantula approaches, often leading to the T passing it up. They can also dig and hide (I’ve had ones I thought were eaten reappear months later). To prevent either of these scenarios, crush their heads before dropping them in.
Other Feeder Options
These are just a handful of the feeder options available, and some ones that I have experience with. I know hobbyists in the UK often use locusts, which sound like a fantastic food source. There are also waxworms, earthworms, Madagascar hissing cockroaches, and lobster roaches.
Simplifying the Tarantula Feeding Process
I often read about the strange, complicated, and often totally unnecessary rituals some keepers go through when they feed their Ts. Now, I’m not judging, and if it works for you, great. However, I do think that some folks make this process a lot more complicated then it needs to be. Drop in the prey item - You don’t have to hold it in front of the T or make it dance with tongs. All joking aside, there is no need to do anything other than what is described above. This is an animal that has evolved over millions of years; they wouldn’t have made it this far if they couldn’t figure out how to eat. Tarantulas are excellent hunters and, in most circumstances, they will have no problems detecting and snatching prey. Don’t worry about dropping the feeder right next to the spider either, as you will chance startling the T. I like to drop it across the enclosure from the tarantula to give it a chance to detect the prey animal and to get a chance to hunt. It worth it to note that many tarantulas are nocturnal, so you may want to do your feedings at night before bed.
When to Avoid Tong-Feeding
Finally, in most instances, there is no need to tong-feed your tarantula. I hear so many people new to the hobby using tongs to essentially hand-feed their animals. In most cases, this is completely unnecessary and serves only to put the keeper and the T in danger. Not only can a spider injure a fang if it attacks the tongs, but they’ve been known to run up tongs to escape or bite their owners.
Conclusion
This is a hobby in which research and, more importantly, experience brings confidence. Although many of the issues one might encounter when feeding have been addressed above, there are always situations that pop up that might be unusual or rare. Luckily, there are forums and sites like this one that you can go to for help and guidance.