What do tarantulas eat at home? Food insects for the tarantula spider. Is it possible to keep several individuals in one container?

Today I want to touch on one of the most important topics in keeping tarantula spiders, feeding. I’ll note right away that the article is being written for beginners, and will contain simple tips and rules that experienced keepers have long known.

What to feed the tarantula spider:

Tarantula spiders, contrary to their name, do not eat birds, but feed on small (about the size of a spider’s body) insects, which they hunt in their natural habitat. What to feed the tarantula spider at home?

The answer to this question is very simple - feeding insects. The most popular feeding insects are marble , Turkmen , Madagascan , Argentinean and other cockroaches, as well as larvae Zophobasa and mealworm.

This general rules, many people consider it optional to comply with them, and videos often appear on the Internet in which the spider is fed with mice or insects from the streets. To be honest, I also like to feed my pets with caught singing grasshoppers.

Why you can’t feed the tarantula spider insects from the street:

Small vertebrates in the form of frogs or newborn mice are very heavy food for the spider; it will eat it for several days, and at this time it will begin to decompose and fill with cadaveric poisons. I also sometimes saw messages on forums that after feeding on vertebrates, spiders, for unknown reasons, became ill with DS. It is not known whether this is connected or not, but, in my opinion, it is better not to risk it.

Again, if you still decide to feed the tarantula spider with small vertebrates, then make sure that the animal is healthy and purchased from a trusted place. Select animals by size; do not give large animals to the tarantula spider, they can damage it.

You should also not feed your tarantula spider other predatory insects, such as praying mantises, other spiders, or scolopendras. There were cases when prey won the fight and killed the tarantula spider.

Summarize: You need to feed the tarantula spider feeding insects of a suitable size (approximately the size of the body of a tarantula spider, excluding legs), purchased from a trusted place, or from our own colonies.

How often to feed a tarantula spider:

Now that we have figured out what to feed the tarantula spider, let's find out how often it should be done.

An adult tarantula spider should be fed 1-2 times a week, appropriate in size feeding insects. When the tarantula spider has eaten enough, it will stop paying attention to food, but sometimes you need to determine for yourself that the spider has “enough” and stop feeding.

Typically, a sign that the tarantula spider has eaten is an increase in the abdomen in relation to the cephalothorax by 1.5-2 times. After this happens, feeding should be stopped to avoid abdominal rupture.

Feeding small tarantula spiders is a little more specific, and I put it in a separate , which you can read by going to link .

• Do not feed the tarantula spider after molting for a certain number of days, which can be calculated by the formula: number of moults + 3-4 days. Otherwise, the food may damage the spider, or other, more specific problems may arise.
• If the tarantula spider does not eat, there is no need to sound the alarm and create topics on forums like: “Alba has not eaten for the 4th day, what should I do?” Refusal to eat is absolutely normal for tarantula spiders; some of them can go on hunger strikes for a period of 1-3 months, without harm to health. This is what the family is usually famous for.Grammostola .
• If the tarantula spider does not eat the insect right away, then you can crush the insect’s head and leave it with the spider overnight. If by morning the spider has not eaten the insect, then the corpse must be removed.
• Do not leave food insects unattended in your spider's enclosure to avoid a number of problems that may arise. For example, when molting, a hungry cockroach or a zofobas larva can damage the spider, a female cockroach can give birth in a container with a spider, and the babies will run away through the ventilation, and so on.

It seems like everything I wanted to tell you may not have turned out very well, but there is a lot of advice here and some of them are even good. And so, with time and experience, you yourself will understand what and when you should feed your tarantula. Thank you for your attention.

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What spiders eat in an apartment or house is no different from their relatives living in wildlife. All are predators with the exception of the horse living in the countries Central America– he eats the green part of the acacia tree. The main diet is insects. Large specimens eat small vertebrates.

Eating in a natural environment

The spider's menu consists of 90% animal food, 10% plant food. The basis of the diet is various insects, which the predator can easily cope with. skillfully cope with reptiles, amphibians, small rodents. Spiders living in aquatic environment, feed on fry, beetle larvae, and crustaceans.

What spiders eat depends on where they live. Large specimens attack anything living they can handle. These are often creatures several times the size of the predator, but the spider wins.

What can it eat? little spider, medium size:

• beetle larvae, moths;
• butterflies;
• beetles;
• grasshoppers;
• locusts;
• crickets;
• snail;
• bee;

Large spiders eat, in addition to insects:

• small birds, chicks;
• mice, rats;
• snakes;
• vipers;
• snake;
• lizards;
• frogs;
• smaller relatives, males of the same species as the female.

It is impossible to say for sure how long a spider can live without food in the wild. Experts say - more than a month. After a satisfying meal, the arthropod will want to eat again after 7-10 days.

Interesting!

One of them can eat a bird, but bird meat is not included in the main diet. Such food is difficult to digest and very heavy. Prefers insects, their relatives.

What do spiders eat in the apartment?

Exotic pets eat everything they eat in the wild. The owners give their charges various insects, scale insects, snails, caterpillars, as well as small vertebrates, reptiles, and amphibians. Large animals are fed rodents.

Which sneak into the room through open windows, doors, cracks in the wall, eat cockroaches, flies, fruit flies, mosquitoes, moth caterpillars, an accidentally flown butterfly, wasp, bee. with complete unsanitary conditions and many pests. Small spiders eat all the living creatures that are in the apartment.

Interesting!

What spiders can eat depends directly on their own size. Small predatory individuals choose fruit flies, mosquitoes, and caterpillars. A medium-sized arthropod can only feed on insects - it catches flies, bees, and wasps. If too large a victim gets entangled in the web, the spider frees it. The same applies to , since they emit an unpleasant odor during self-defense.

How does a spider kill its victims?

Arachnids differ somewhat in their lifestyle, behavior, and hunting tactics.

• Animals wait for their prey in the center of their creation or in close proximity. The presence of insects is determined by vibrations.
• They actively search for a victim, exploring the surrounding area. They attack at the right moment.
• Some spiders do not weave trapping webs, but construct the web in the form of a funnel near the burrow or shelter.

Predators also behave differently - they entangle prey with their threads, leave them for a while, and begin to feed on insects almost instantly. However, initially predators act identically with their victims - they inject a toxic substance.

All spiders have poisonous glands; they kill insects and small vertebrates with chelicerae, which are located in front of the cephalothorax in the form of fangs. A poison with a paralyzing effect, one’s own saliva, is injected into the wound, which turns the insides into a liquid mass.

On a note!

It takes 5 to 15 minutes for the prey to become usable. All this time, the predator watches the insects, sitting to the side. When the body stops convulsing, the meal begins.

How do domestic and wild spiders feed?

Arachnids do not have complete digestive organs. The food is digested from the outside, after which the arthropod absorbs the liquid mass through the mouth. There are no teeth in the mouth either. Chelicerae and pedipalps, similar to tentacles, help crush and grind food. Some spiders are only able to suck up liquid food, while others crush the shell and bite through the skin. The pigtail eats the victim entirely.

Amphibians and rodents take longer to digest. The predator eats a mouse, snake, or frog gradually, turning it in different directions, constantly injecting a new portion of saliva. You can see how spiders eat flies in the video below.

The predator's diet depends on its habitat. An arthropod can go without food for about a month. At large quantities feeds on insects once every 7-10 days. Some members of the family are so “greedy” that they do not crawl to the side until they leave only a shell or an empty space from the victim. In other cases, they leave the prey in reserve.

After reading this article, you will find out what to feed a tarantula, how to select food insects for it, how often they need to be fed, and why spiders may refuse to eat.

Tarantula spiders, like all spiders, are animals with external digestion. This means that they have no teeth and cannot chew or tear their food into pieces. Instead, nature endowed them with a completely unique mechanism - external digestion.

When a spider lunges at a victim, it injects poison into it. The venom of different species of spiders acts differently; in some species it is so toxic that it kills immediately, while in other species it paralyzes the nervous or respiratory system. But in absolutely all species, the poison immediately starts the process of external digestion. All solid organs become liquid, and the spider simply drinks it up, leaving an empty shell.

All tarantulas, without exception, are carnivores. I believe that the insect or food animal must be alive, otherwise the spider may simply not pay attention to it.

So, what to feed a tarantula? Any animal or insect that is suitable in size. Small spiders can be fed every other day with insects that are no larger than the size of the spider's abdomen. Small crickets and small marbled cockroaches are very suitable as such food insects. I recommend taking 20 of them at a time so that your pet always has food. The most important thing a young spider needs is a temperature of 24 degrees, humidity of 70 percent, and food. Then the spider will grow continuously and very quickly. Sometimes it happens that young spiders refuse to eat. This means either something is wrong with the conditions of detention, or your spider is preparing to molt. If a spider is preparing to molt, the abdomen of young spiders turns black.

It is much easier to select food insects for adult spiders. These can be crickets, both small and large, marbled cockroaches, mealworms, locusts, newborn mice, small frogs. In general, everything that moves and does not exceed the size of a spider. However, there are species that attack animals significantly larger than themselves. For example, a goliath spider can attack a two-meter snake with its maximum size of 30 centimeters. Be sure to ensure that adult spiders always have pure water. Place a wide, shallow drinking bowl in the terrarium and fill it with water every day.

I make my own gel for my spiders. I buy Terra Aqua powder, it is based on seaweed, I take a teaspoon of this powder and 100 ml of water. I dissolve the powder and put it in the microwave for a minute. After the water has cooled, it turns into a gel, which is very convenient to cut into pieces and give in doses. As soon as my spider eats this piece, I give him another one. One such 100 ml mold is enough for my spider for 2 weeks. And there is so much of this powder in jars that it is enough to make 11 liters of gel. It is also very convenient when you leave to prepare such a mold, place it all in the terrarium and the spider will always have water. I left it completely calmly and without consequences for the spider for 3 weeks.

Do you already have a tarantula spider or do you just want to get one?

Please write your answer in the comments.

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As mentioned earlier, tarantula spiders are obligate predators and feed exclusively on animal food.

As is known, in nature, tarantulas eat only moving prey, but in captivity, both young spiders and adult specimens have been observed eating immobilized food objects, as well as their individual parts, pieces of meat and fish (individually).

The most important principle of feeding tarantulas is that the food should be as varied as possible and not pose a danger to the spiders themselves.

The frequency of feeding and the size of food items depend on the age of the tarantulas themselves. For intensive rearing of fry, the method of continuous feeding is recommended, i.e. As one food item is consumed, another is offered. With this technique, used with simultaneous maintenance at elevated temperatures, young spiders grow very quickly, noticeably increasing in size with each molt, and in the first 2-3 instars, the intervals between molts are less than a month. In any case, it is recommended to feed young spiders at least twice a week. The size of the food item for young spiders should not exceed the size of their abdomen.

On the other hand, intensive feeding of adult spiders accelerates their aging, so offering food 2-3 times a month would be considered the optimal regimen.

Main feeds at home are: different kinds crickets (house, banana, red-headed, two-spotted), cockroaches (marbled, Madagascar, Colombian), mealworms, zoophobus (or giant mealworm), locusts, frogs, small lizards, naked mice and young mice.

Remember that a spider is able to go without food for weeks without harm to its health, with unlimited access to water, and for large specimens for months. For example, naturally such a giant as Theraphosa blondi, may refuse food for 2-3 months before the onset of molting, as well as another 1-2 months after molting; and for natural specimens Grammostola rosea fasting for up to six months or more is a physiological feature.

Scientists conducted an experiment regarding the duration of fasting of tarantulas. The established maximum period of fasting is two years, nine months and nineteen days ( Baerg, W.J."Tarantula Spider")

As a substitute for regular feed, it is also possible to feed tarantulas pieces of beef, chicken meat and fish. But in this case, eating them depends on the specific spider specimen, since some specimens never accept such food, while others willingly eat it.

Do not attempt to feed your tarantula while it is pre-molting, molting, or immediately after molting!

In this case, the active insect (for example, a cricket) will not be eaten and, moreover, can damage the integument of the tarantula with its jaws, resulting in possible adverse consequences for the health of the spider, including its death.

Try to disturb him as little as possible at this time and under no circumstances pick him up.

It is advisable to offer food to a shed tarantula only a few days after the spider has moulted and it exoskeleton will finally harden. For large specimens, as already noted, this period can last up to a month or more.

Known fact long-term food refusal recorded for the Chilean tarantula Grammostola rosea, living in places with pronounced cold periods. Obviously, this behavior is also likely for other species of tarantulas belonging to 2nd group.

In any case, always clean up feed object, if it is not eaten within 24 hours. It is advisable to make the next offer to his tarantula only after a day.

It is also necessary to carefully monitor the hygienic cleanliness of the terrarium and remove organic debris remaining after the tarantula eats, pieces of food animals, and excrement.

As already stated, Water is vital for tarantula spiders. When keeping medium-sized tarantulas, it is advisable to install a water bowl in the terrarium. Large instances need to be given access to open water for drinking in mandatory. At the same time, on average, a water change is required once a week, since many terrestrial species dump the chewed remains of the food animal and excrement directly into the drinking bowl.

Newborn and young spiders can do without a special container of water, as long as there is a layer of moist substrate sufficient to dig a hole.

To live, a spider must eat

One of the most important topics in the science of keeping house spiders is the topic of feeding. Moreover, the importance of this topic applies to absolutely all types of spiders home care- be it on, or on some other type of these creatures. Therefore, today we will try to learn about the tips and rules for feeding spiders, and how to what can you feed your furry pets, and what is not recommended to give them?.

If you are planning to get a spider or have already got one, then you must familiarize yourself with this information...

What to feed your house spider

In nature, these predators feed on everything that moves, taking into account their size and measuring their capabilities. Living in your terrarium, which you have equipped for your house spider, such a pet can only rely on your choice in matters of its nutrition. That's why, We would recommend that you consider options for creating a feeding diet for your cutie spider from food insects. Such as Argentinean, marbled, Turkmen and other types of cockroaches (except for domestic ones - why? Read about this below).

What not to feed spiders

After the point about what you can give to spiders as food, we naturally suggest you consider the point about what you can’t give to them as food. So, despite the fact that there is an opinion that a spider can be fed with small vertebrates and even birds (they say, a spider is a tarantula, there is no need to think about what it will eat) - it is still not worth feeding them with frogs, mice and birds. The fact is that, as practice shows, very often after such feeding spiders begin to get sick and then die completely. Indigestion, or some other reason, but we would not recommend taking risks.

Also, you should not feed spiders with domestic cockroaches, much less release them to hunt them. Cockroaches may turn out to be sick, or migrate to you from your neighbors, having already been poisoned, and after such a noble dinner, your spider may stretch out its legs. Oh, you don't want this to happen, do you?

It is also not recommended to give the spider insects that you yourself caught on the street. It is, of course, good that you care so much about your pet that you turned into a breadwinner for him, but, like cockroaches, such insects can be sick or poisoned, and... goodbye spider.

If circumstances so arise that your spider is left without food, and you do not have the opportunity to purchase such food for it at a pet store (weekends, holidays) so that your pet does not go hungry, you can still go “hunting”. True, collect insects as far from the road as possible. After this, inspect them and rinse them with water. If possible, they can be quarantined; if not possible, hope for the best and feed your spider.

As for the ban on feeding frogs and newborn mice, this is still heavy food for your pet and he will eat it for several days, and during this time it will have time to decompose in a warm terrarium and be filled with cadaveric poisons. If you still can’t wait to see how your spider copes with a mouse, make sure that the animal is healthy and its size does not exceed the size of the spider itself. Since in such an unequal fight it is not known who will emerge victorious.

You should not give spiders other predatory insects as food. For example, mantises, scolopendras or other spiders. In this case, it will no longer be clear who you are feeding and who is serving as a living dinner. So, remember - it is better to feed spiders at home with food insects.

How often should you feed a spider?

The frequency of feeding depends on the age of the spider

Well, we have cleared up such nuances as what can be given as food and what cannot. Now, let's talk about the frequency of feedings. So, for an adult spider, the optimal diet would be the following schedule - 1-2 times a week. If you see that the spider does not finish its meal and does not look hungry, you can reduce the frequency of feeding and try feeding it once a week. In general, you should be guided by your pet’s appetite: if he wants to eat, let him eat; if he doesn’t want to, don’t force him.

By the way, you can determine whether a spider is full by the size of its abdomen; if it has increased 2-3 times than before the start of the meal, it means that it is better to drive the spider away from the food and take away its remains.

Some spiders are real gluttons and cannot control their appetite. But in this case, what threatens them is not obesity, but a rupture of the abdomen, which, in principle, can no longer be treated. So, you yourself should be the nutritionist for your spider.

Little spiderlings need to be fed more often - they have a growing body, so their portions should be smaller. Well, giving them live “big” game in the form of mice and frogs is strictly prohibited.

When not to feed a spider

Sometimes your spider will benefit from going on a diet. So, for example, it is not recommended to feed him immediately after molting. In order to find out when you can start giving him food, use this simple formula: what kind of molt was this (it’s better to write down such information in a separate notebook so as not to make mistakes) + 3-4 days for it, so that the spider’s body becomes stronger.

If you offer the spider food for several days in a row, but it stubbornly refuses it, you shouldn’t be too intrusive. Give him the opportunity to fast. Some spiders may not even eat for several months. This is quite normal for them.

And by the way, remember Golden Rule – food remains (living or already dead) must be removed from the terrarium. Get yourself such a useful habit. Then, for example, you will avoid such unpleasant situations as the birth of small cockroaches in your terrarium (if the female cockroach was pregnant) and their forays into your territory through the ventilation holes.

What to feed baby spiders

We have already written that small spiderlings need to be fed more often, and their portions should be small. But where can you get such small insects? If there is a shortage of this in your nearest pet store, we can help you out with practical advice.

Buy ordinary large insects and... cut them into small pieces. This is especially convenient with mealworms and zophobos. So, for example, one mealworm can be enough for lunch for 6-7 spiderlings.

Some sources on spider science and their maintenance write that spiderlings can be fed with bloodworms - this is both convenient and practical. However, we would not recommend that you indulge in such a diet. Yes, the spiders on the bloodworm eat off and begin to molt, but since the bloodworm itself contains practically nothing else except water, your spider on such “grub” is unlikely to grow healthy, big and beautiful. So, think about what you want - convenience for yourself or health for your spider?