Help out a Beginner Tarantula Keeper! (+Bee Pollen?)

[catkibbleeater]

Hai!! I'm planning on getting my first tarantula soon, a Hapalopus Formosus (Groot) aka the Pumpkin Patch Tarantula! I've seen that they make a good beginner species online and I'd love any tips for my first tarantula! I've decided to get them as a sling, is that wise? Anything you wish you'd known about getting a first tarantula? Literally, anything will help, lol. I have a list of links to materials that I believe I will need but I always feel like I might be missing something.

Technically, I had a tarantula as a tiny kid (before I can really remember) who was NOT properly researched for whatsoever. My dad just found him on the ground at his work and gave him to me one day. Raising a tarantula PROPERLY will be my redemption for that poor little dude.

Also, someone told me I could feed a T bee pollen. I dunno if that's true, and the internet has been minimally helpful. If any of y'all have experience with that please let me know!! Thanks love you miss you

 

[NMTs]

Hai!! I'm planning on getting my first tarantula soon, a Hapalopus Formosus (Groot) aka the Pumpkin Patch Tarantula! I've seen that they make a good beginner species online and I'd love any tips for my first tarantula! I've decided to get them as a slin, is that wise? Anything you wish you'd known about getting a first tarantula? Literally, anything will help, lol. I have a list of links to materials that I believe I will need but I always feel like I might be missing something.

Technically, I had a tarantula as a tiny kid (before I can really remember) who was NOT properly researched for whatsoever. My dad just found him on the ground at his work and gave him to me one day. Raising a tarantula PROPERLY will be my redemption for that poor little dude.

Also, someone told me I could feed a T bee pollen. I dunno if that's true, and the internet has been minimally helpful. If any of y'all have experience with that please let me know!! Thanks love you miss you

Tarantulas eat insects, not insect byproducts.

 

[Arachnophobphile]

Hai!! I'm planning on getting my first tarantula soon, a Hapalopus Formosus (Groot) aka the Pumpkin Patch Tarantula! I've seen that they make a good beginner species online and I'd love any tips for my first tarantula! I've decided to get them as a sling, is that wise? Anything you wish you'd known about getting a first tarantula? Literally, anything will help, lol. I have a list of links to materials that I believe I will need but I always feel like I might be missing something.

Technically, I had a tarantula as a tiny kid (before I can really remember) who was NOT properly researched for whatsoever. My dad just found him on the ground at his work and gave him to me one day. Raising a tarantula PROPERLY will be my redemption for that poor little dude.

Also, someone told me I could feed a T bee pollen. I dunno if that's true, and the internet has been minimally helpful. If any of y'all have experience with that please let me know!! Thanks love you miss you

Hi and welcome to AB.

This link will get you started in the right direction.

Admin Announcement - Tarantula Information for Beginners (and More)

Below are some helpful resources. (Rather than having half a dozen or more pinned threads, which clutter the top of the board, we are pinning this index.) While the focus is on beginners, there are other threads on health and more advanced species that may be useful to more experienced keepers...

arachnoboards.com

 

[SpookySpooder]

Tarantulas eat insects, not insect byproducts.

My Tarantulas identify as Vegan, so I'm getting them used to eating soy. We don't believe in the harming of insects for our meals.

@Arachnophobphile
You laugh, but compared to the keepers that feed strictly animal products such as crickets or Ham, my T's have a healthier diet and their karma is better.

 

[catboyeuthanasia]

Howdy and welcome to the hobby! Small new world tarantulas are my absolute favorites and they are an excellent place to pick back up!

I would start by doing a lot of reading online and in the links posted above and come back with specific questions if something is unclear.

For some general tips:
- Tarantulas should eat live insects. There's a variety of options you can choose from though, and some are easier to deal with than others
- Try not to be too stressed. An easy way to stress out your Tarantula is to mess with its enclosure too often. If you have your enclosure set up correctly (see: above threads and online caresheets) don't worry about your Tarantula hiding for a long time, or not eating for weeks. I know young dwarf Ts like to burrow, so don't worry if it's underground for a while.
- Tarantulas are addictive. Building on the last point, Tarantulas like to hide a lot and are generally low maintenance. This means that it's both a lot more fun and completely viable to keep a bunch of them! It's easy to fall into the loop of buying Ts, and find yourself with more than you can handle (don't literally handle them though...)

Happy hunting, dear Catperson

 

[viper69]

Hai!! I'm planning on getting my first tarantula soon, a Hapalopus Formosus (Groot) aka the Pumpkin Patch Tarantula! I've seen that they make a good beginner species online and I'd love any tips for my first tarantula! I've decided to get them as a sling, is that wise? Anything you wish you'd known about getting a first tarantula? Literally, anything will help, lol. I have a list of links to materials that I believe I will need but I always feel like I might be missing something.

Technically, I had a tarantula as a tiny kid (before I can really remember) who was NOT properly researched for whatsoever. My dad just found him on the ground at his work and gave him to me one day. Raising a tarantula PROPERLY will be my redemption for that poor little dude.

Also, someone told me I could feed a T bee pollen. I dunno if that's true, and the internet has been minimally helpful. If any of y'all have experience with that please let me know!! Thanks love you miss you

No on Bee pollen! They eat insects, not “dust”.

What has your research told you?

 

[Denn]

Also, someone told me I could feed a T bee pollen. I dunno if that's true, and the internet has been minimally helpful. If any of y'all have experience with that please let me know!! Thanks love you miss you

Just when I thought I'd heard it all! I'm not sure your T would do well being fed a bunch of dust.

Hapalopus formosus is a great little tarantula though. Can be a little skittish, fairly quick, but I'd still say they're easy enough to care for even as a first T. Just make sure you don't keep it too dry. They like substrate on the moist side. Otherwise they are fairly hardy dwarf T that eats really well. Good luck!

 

[catkibbleeater]

Thanks to all of y’all who helped!! I figured the bee pollen thing wasn’t true lol, but yannow, just wanted to check. Will for sure be taking all the advice I’ve gotten here into account!!

 

[Denn]

Thanks to all of y’all who helped!! I figured the bee pollen thing wasn’t true lol, but yannow, just wanted to check. Will for sure be taking all the advice I’ve gotten here into account!!

Yes! no bee pollen! only insects! if you have any more questions, search engines are amazing, don't trust "care sheets", and if you can't find something here on AB that hasn't already been covered, feel free to ask questions!

 

[MariaLewisia]

First of all: hi! Welcome to the hobby!

Second of all: the only thing I can think of adding to this conversation that hasn't been said yet (I think?) is that while H. formosus are good beginner Ts, they start out small as slings. Like, really small. A speck of dust basically. So small it will be invisible amongst the substrate. So if you want a H. formosus I really really recommend you get a well started juvenile. Otherwise the size alone would be stress inducing to a complete beginner.

 

[Gevo]

I'm brand new to the hobby as well, and when researching beginner species, Hapalopus formosas was definitely not one that came up in any of the many beginner species lists I saw, and I would not have considered it for myself because I saw information saying they can be very fast and quick to bolt out of the enclosure during feeding and rehousing. But, I like what Tom Moran had to say about beginner species, which is that what counts as "beginner" for one person might not be the same for another person, so if you've researched the species thoroughly and feel comfortable with it, power to you! Do be sure to check out multiple beginner species lists, though, and then look more into any species that interest you to make sure it's the right choice for you.

One thing you may want to consider is that small slings of any species are always harder to care for and can sometimes die even if you're doing everything right, which is partly why they're often cheaper and come in deals when you buy 3 or 5 of them (also because people sometimes want to try their luck getting a female!), so if you're not very experienced or confident yet, it might be better to consider a juvenile or adult.

Things I wish I'd known when I started:

- Expos can be really overwhelming. I was ready to buy a Grammastola pulchra the weekend before and was discouraged from doing so because the expo was coming up, and several people told me I should wait for that because it'd be so amazing. I can see how expos would be fun for people who already know a lot about different species or who want to browse for additions to a collection or shop for great deals, but as a beginner who wanted to take my time with the decision, it was a terrible idea. It was noisy and crowded, no one at the booths had a lot of time to consult me because they were getting swarmed with people, it's hard to think straight and remember all this new information you're just learning while looking at a table full of deli cups and scientific names, and in my case, because I didn't know what I'd end up coming home with in terms of size, I couldn't prepare ahead of time and get an appropriate enclosure set up. Everything worked out in the end (I got the exact same 2" Grammastola pulchra I was eyeing the week before, plus a 2.5" Brachypelma hamorii), but it was much more stressful than it should have been.

- Tarantulas can be kept very well in lots of different enclosure types, and you certainly don't have to spend a lot of money on fancy setups, but in my case, as a nervous beginner who's still a bit jumpy about working with tarantulas and feeding live insects and such, I needed something that would make me feel comfortable caring for my spiders. To me, that meant I needed something that would open smoothly, that would feel secure, that would offer some space between me and the spider (not too much, of course, but some!), and that I could set up to look attractive on a shelf. I had trouble finding enclosures at first because no tarantula-specific enclosures were being sold at this reptile expo, so I first ended up with some modified hard plastic food containers with holes drilled into them, and that made for a rough first ten days or so. These containers had airtight lids, so you had to kind of pop them off when opening them, and that made my spiders jumpy, which made me jumpy. Also, they were only about 3" high, so with substrate in there, opening them was like, BAM! spider in your face (or BAM! human in your face, I guess!), which was hard for me to get comfortable with. I was seriously starting to regret my decision to get into this because each time I had to open the enclosures, I was really nervous and anxious, but I ordered some pricier purpose-built acrylic enclosures (Primal Fear Tarantulas), and once everyone was set up in those, things became much, much better, and I'm now having the good tarantula-keeping experience I was hoping to have. This was of course entirely personal for me, so the lesson I'm getting at here is that you're going to see a lot of opinions online about enclosures and such, and most of them are perfectly correct for the people who are offering those opinions, but what you need to do for yourself is figure out your needs, figure out your tarantula's needs, and make whatever decision is going to work for the both of you so you can actually enjoy taking care of them.



Oh, and ignore that bee pollen thing.