best food for feeding small slings?

[sschind]

This thread may be five years old and revived for little reason, but I'm thankful for it anyway! I needed the ideas for feeding my future tiny slings, so the answers aren't going to waste.

Apparently you should have started another thread and asked what to feed your future tiny slings

 

[Bravehawk]

Great knowledge never expires, and much better to respond to an old thread than make a new one to only add to the infinite numbers of posts to shift thru.

 

[Poec54]

Great knowledge never expires, and much better to respond to an old thread than make a new one to only add to the infinite numbers of posts to shift thru.

+1. There's a lot of great info in older posts; there used to be a lot of big collectors and breeders here, along with a few taxonomists. This was a cutting edge forum in the past, and it's in no one's best interests to bypass the info shared by those people.

 

[Envoirment]

I've had great success with mealworms. Recently bought "mini" ones and they're perfect for slings. I usually crush their head and drop them in - even with a crushed head they'll squirm about to invoke a response from the tarantula. If your tarantula is shy, they'll eventually stop squirming and then will be readily taken. If your mealworms are too big, crush the head and slice them up into smaller pieces and drop them in. I usually don't leave a mealworm in for more than a day.

For those slings that are very shy and don't appear to be taking mealworms - cricket legs work well. Just take the legs off a medium-larged sized cricket. It's a little tricky at first but somewhat satisfying once you get the hang of it.

Small crickets work very well too. In fact if you can; find a cricket about the size of the sling, crush its head and drop it in. If the sling responds, that meal should get them very plump and you won't need to feed them as regularly (once a week/10 days). Particularly when they're small, they may only need one large sized meal to trigger a molt. Some slings don't respond to large prey though, even when dead.

For me, I make do with what I've got. I have plenty of mealworms so I'm using them at the moment. But sometimes I've only large crickets which are way too big for slings - so I take their legs off for the slings and feed the legless crickets to my larger tarantulas. The above are the things I've done and have had success with, but there are other alternatives such as flightless fruit flies and bean weevils.