a couple p. regalis questions

[driver]

ok, first i'm wondering if my 4" p. regalis is big enough to start taking on pinkie mice?

and second i notice him webbing off a corner behind a silk plant, he doesn't seem to want anything to do with hanging out near the hide or the bark, he just wants to stay in his webbed off corner most of the day and come out at night. it just looks funny the way he pushes himself down in the corner on the glass, nothing like the pics i always see. he seems fine otherwise, is this regular behavior? i thought they liked to web to their bark?

 

[TheDarkFinder]

ok, first i'm wondering if my 4" p. regalis is big enough to start taking on pinkie mice?

and second i notice him webbing off a corner behind a silk plant, he doesn't seem to want anything to do with hanging out near the hide or the bark, he just wants to stay in his webbed off corner most of the day and come out at night. it just looks funny the way he pushes himself down in the corner on the glass, nothing like the pics i always see. he seems fine otherwise, is this regular behavior? i thought they liked to web to their bark?

As for the question about the mice, I would say once they reach 9 feet long and weight about 120 lbs do I start feeding them mice. But until then never.

If you do a simple search you will find more then enough reading on mice and tarantulas health. But that is not saying you should not feed your tarantula the pinky, go ahead.

As for the webbing, yes they web everything they get near. That is what they do.

 

[sick4x4]

at 4"s well you could:? but why??? there is a nasty mess to clean up and unless its a breeding female, there really isn't a need to feed pinkies....besides roaches are more entertaining to watch get hunted down....

for your second question yes it is normal to web maybe he's going into a molt or just liked that spot better but webbing goes without saying at least you know hes getting comfortable in his home....

 

[Rydog]

If ypur pokie is webbing that means you are doing something right. Pinkies aren't as entertaining as you might think all that happens is a little mouse that has no idea where it is and can't even see gets taken REALLY easily by something born to hunt, plus the mess. Rather feed it a roach its much more exciting believe me.

 

[Merfolk]

Also, the T will be bloated and motionless for weeks afterward. Get a feeder gecko or catch a small frog from the fartest place possible from anything man made. T's do eat cold blooded verts in the wild and their digestive tracks kind of
process it faster, they are hungry less than a week afterward... Warm blooded preys are sometimes taken, but digesting them seems to make the T dormant.

Pinkies are boring to watch though, so I go along the others. It is basically T's junk food!

 

[vanquisher91]

At 4", your tarantula may not even touch it, or it may just kill it out of instinct and leave it rot. There is no reason to feed anything other than crix or roaches and maybe the occasional frog or anole to your T, as in the wild they rarely will be caught consuming many warm blooded verts, and even then, it's usually only the largest species like the L. Parahybana or the T. Blondi.

I kind of have a negative disposition on feeding mostly anything that hasn't even lived a life yet, to any animal. In the wild, I know it happens, but that is nature working, and I don't think I have the right to take that into my own hands. I can watch an insect or invert get hunted down, but it's just something about verts that I can't handle. I think it has to do with the fact that I have kept mice and rats and small verts as pets since early childhood. To me it would be like feeding a baby tarantula to a scorpion, I couldn't do it, as I adore both. Not to mention the mess with feeding verts.

 

[cacoseraph]

at 4" you could feed it the very smallest sized pinky mice you find, no problem. if you do find the very small pinkies their will be no mess and no smell, even feeding it to a tarantula that size.

 

[stk5m]

Feeding pinkies is always a mess. the only time i do it is about two days before i rehouse the tarantula. That way i can clean up the mess before it starts smelling absolutely disgusting.

As for the webbing, its completely normal. All my pokies do it.

 

[cacoseraph]

Feeding pinkies is always a mess. the only time i do it is about two days before i rehouse the tarantula. That way i can clean up the mess before it starts smelling absolutely disgusting.

As for the webbing, its completely normal. All my pokies do it.

you are feeding too large of pinkies then

out of ~10-15 times i have fed pinkies to my bugs i have never had a mess with a tarantula. typically i can't even tell the pinky bolus from a roach bolus. of course, the pinky is considerably smaller than the tarantula's abdomen, even just post molt...

centipedes on the other hand... pretty much always a mess of some degree to clean up or recage from, unless fed in a seperate container

 

[Varden]

I second Cacoseraph. I feed pinkies on the rare occasion to my male-snacking females before I breed, and if the pinkie isn't too large, then there's never a mess. Just a bolus wadded up in the water dish like any other feeding. The one thing that bothers me about it is listening to the poor pinkie squealing over and over and over again, because it's NEVER an instant death. It takes a LONG time for them to die, and the T is usually turning them inside out before the pinkie has stopped moving all the way. Very sad.

 

[Staley]

1 mouse or 10 crickets. I am going to start buying feeder mice for my T's

 

[driver]

Over the last couple days he seems to have become very shy, hardly moving at all, he stays in his little corner so still that i just had to give him a nudge to be sure he hadn't died on me. He crawled up on the glass a bit so I could see his belly, and on the yellowish band across his abdomen i see a dried up x shaped area right through the band which wasn't there a couple days ago. picture an xbox shaped type x, if you know what I mean. Is this premolt thing or is could it be a humidity problem? It's looking like pretty pre-moltish activity, but I'm a little bit concerned about eh humidity as I haven't received my humidity gauge yet. The waterdish is dry every day, so i top up the dish daily and mist the subtrate lightly. just trying to guess whats going on here...

 

[cacoseraph]

Over the last couple days he seems to have become very shy, hardly moving at all, he stays in his little corner so still that i just had to give him a nudge to be sure he hadn't died on me. He crawled up on the glass a bit so I could see his belly, and on the yellowish band across his abdomen i see a dried up x shaped area right through the band which wasn't there a couple days ago. picture an xbox shaped type x, if you know what I mean. Is this premolt thing or is could it be a humidity problem? It's looking like pretty pre-moltish activity, but I'm a little bit concerned about eh humidity as I haven't received my humidity gauge yet. The waterdish is dry every day, so i top up the dish daily and mist the subtrate lightly. just trying to guess whats going on here...

without knowing anything else, it sounds like it might be a humidity issue. i would flood the cage and add a water dish or two

 

[driver]

alright, so one of the small webs my regalis spun was a three inch long by one inch wide heavily webbed sort of flat tube shaped web, which i caught him resing his body over top of last night. i woke up this morning and he had torn it down just about completely. was this a sperm web? and what will the bulbs on his forelegs look like? there's what look like two little reddish bulbs i noticed looking this morning that are located on what i guess you could consider his "heel". but i hadn't really takent hat close a look at them yet.

he seems to be back to being his regular self again now after a couple days of upping the humidity of the tank, i think it was just a humidity issue, he seems to begrowing hairs back over the dried spot already...

 

[cacoseraph]

alright, so one of the small webs my regalis spun was a three inch long by one inch wide heavily webbed sort of flat tube shaped web, which i caught him resing his body over top of last night. i woke up this morning and he had torn it down just about completely. was this a sperm web? and what will the bulbs on his forelegs look like? there's what look like two little reddish bulbs i noticed looking this morning that are located on what i guess you could consider his "heel". but i hadn't really takent hat close a look at them yet.

he seems to be back to being his regular self again now after a couple days of upping the humidity of the tank, i think it was just a humidity issue, he seems to begrowing hairs back over the dried spot already...

if you are seeing those red bulbs on his pedipalps (the longish appendages closest to fangs that look similar to legs) then you have a mature male

 

[driver]

after a bit of searching and finding some good pics i am certain his is indeed a mature male. now i've just got to find him a girlfriend.

does anyone have any pics of a regalis sperm web? i couldn't turn any up in my search yet, but after looking at some other species sperm webs it seems to look like thats what he has had going on the last couple days...

 

[cacoseraph]

after a bit of searching and finding some good pics i am certain his is indeed a mature male. now i've just got to find him a girlfriend.

does anyone have any pics of a regalis sperm web? i couldn't turn any up in my search yet, but after looking at some other species sperm webs it seems to look like thats what he has had going on the last couple days...

by the time i saw the sperm webs they were just little twists of thicker/denser webbing. all the sperm webs i have seen have been relatively small and i doubt they could hold the full weight of the spider that made them

 

[driver]

by the time i saw the sperm webs they were just little twists of thicker/denser webbing. all the sperm webs i have seen have been relatively small and i doubt they could hold the full weight of the spider that made them

he didn't support himself on it so much as he did straddle it. it wasn't big enough to sit on, just flop his body onto with his legs over either side. the morning after i saw him laying on it it was tore down almost completely. it was just a thickly webbed stretch but the size of a strip of bacon, between the hide i gave him and the wall of his tank. it looks completelydifferent than the larger hide-like web he has built in the one corner, which he left intact...

if anyone has any pokie spermweb pix i'd still like to see them...

 

[cacoseraph]

he didn't support himself on it so much as he did straddle it. it wasn't big enough to sit on, just flop his body onto with his legs over either side. the morning after i saw him laying on it it was tore down almost completely. it was just a thickly webbed stretch but the size of a strip of bacon, between the hide i gave him and the wall of his tank. it looks completelydifferent than the larger hide-like web he has built in the one corner, which he left intact...

if anyone has any pokie spermweb pix i'd still like to see them...

i'm pretty sure that was a sperm web then. so now he is ready to roll.

too bad you are in the big CA, as i just had my large female regalis molt ~ a month ago

 

[driver]

are the palpal emboli visible only when "charged" up, or are they visible at all times? does anyone have any pictures of a charged embolus vs. and uncharged one? and how long will they hold a charge? if they aren't in a breeding situation, will they eventually, you know, "take care of it" themselves, and prepare a fresh spermweb?