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FEEDING
Having
a tarantula as a pet, feeding is about as easy as you could wish for.
The only drawback is that it eats live food ,and there is no commercial
food you can feed them on so if you find it hard to feed live food, then
a tarantula may not be a good choice of pet. The usual diet of these pets
will be insects,other spiders and and similar arthropods.the size of their
prey will obviously depend on the size of your spider EG. a spiderling
would hardly be able to cope with a large insect the best thing to use
would be very small crickets but a large spider would almost certainly
ignore very small insects apart from arthropods.
The larger spider such as the "birdeater" would take a 'pinky'. A pinky
is a baby mouse only a day or two old but this is not essential. For example
the most popular food for your spider are as follows: cockroaches, crickets,
grasshoppers, mealworms, earthworms, maggots, flies, beetles, moths, aphids
and butterflies.The
inset picture clearly shows a spider is eating a cricket. The cricket
being eaten by this Goliath Bird Eater (Theraphosa Leblondi) will soon
be an empty shell.
Tarantulas & other arachnids partially digest their food out side the
body, bathing it in digestive fluids from the mouth. Most
owners will limit the diet to crickets and give a change of food purely
just for a change of diet offerings on the basis that a little variety
is the spice of life. You will find that most food are bred commercially
and sold in most pet shops It is best that you purchase your food from
shops because there is less chance of these harboring dangerous bacteria
or parasites. In the wild most spiders have to set traps, and may not
see food for days or even weeks and this is how I feed my spiders, I beleve
that they should work for there food ie, making traps by webbing. when
and how much to feed Tarantulas are variable with regard to their appetites
some are greedy while others spiders are happy to live very small amounts
as a rough guide to a med/large spider will eat 3 to 5 adult cricket per
week sometimes they will kill and eat 2 or 3 quit quickly and other times
they will kill a few but only eat 1 or 2 The others will probably be killed
and wrapped in a silk cocoon to be eaten later.
It has been established that the tarantula can go for many months without food and for over two months without water. I certainly do not advise you to think in these terms,but rather to be sure your spider feed each week,assuming it wants to When they are about to molt they will go off there food as they might at any time. For this reason it might be best that you are satisfied they have been feeding well and are in excellent condition so they can easily go thorough a biological fast without any problems.
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