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- Jul 16, 2004
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No. Humidity is one of the most misunderstood topics in tarantula care. Read Humidity... It has its place, but as with most things about tarantulas, not quite the way you'd first expect.
Marguerite and I have kept many king baboons (Pelenobius muticus) and cobalt blues (Haplopelma lividum) over the years (we'd get in babies and sell them over a year or more as they grew), and we always kept them as burrowers in effectively arid cages.
King baboons (Pelenobius muticus) come from the veldts of Africa: hot, dry prairie type land with seasonal rainy periods.
Cobalt blues (Haplopelma lividum) come from Thailand, but they are not necessarily rain forest tarantulas. Jan-Philipp Samadi had published a webpage, Spinnen in der Natur: Thailand - English, on the Internet showing their habitat, but it's been removed. He has indicated in a personal E-mail that a better version is in progress and will be posted shortly.
Basically, the "right humidity" is relatively dry. When we were keeping them we did little to control humidity directly. Virtually all our tarantula cages were covered with plastic food wrap, but that was because Calgary, Alberta, Canada is in the rain shadow of the Canadian Rocky Mountains and suffers from "humidity so low out there it could suck water out of a rock!" (Actual phrase used by a weather forecaster at a local TV station.) Even for desert species that was too dry, especially in winter. Most other places in the world wouldn't require that practice.
So, the substrate was kept mostly dry, but every week or two I would pour a third or half cup of room temperature tap water down the burrows. (We gave up trying to keep water dishes with them. They merely buried them during their earth moving projects.) This would dampen the substrate around them for a few hours to a day or so at a time.
I have never, ever used a hygrometer in any of my cages. There's no need. Watch the tarantula. It'll tell you when it's to dry.
Enjoy your little 8-legged hygrometer!
