How often should I feed them?

Geography Guy

Arachnobaron
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Mar 15, 2006
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Hi People

OK, most of my Ts are about 2.5 inches. I feed all my Ts large crickets. How many crickets and how often should I feed the 2.5 inchers? Same question goes for my larger 4 inchers? Same question for my lil 0.5 inchers, maybe less, except I don't feed them large crickets. I feed them pin heads sometimes pre-killed depending on what I have. So how often and how many crickets should I feed my 0.5 inchers, 2.5 inchers, and 4 inchers? Some ppl say you can feed an invert to death so I am trying to avoid that.

Cheers
 

tin man

Arachnobaron
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you should feed your 2.5 inch one adult cricketts, and your 4 inch one you can feed crickets, frogs, fuzzy mice, grasshoppers, and locust, and probably a bunch more. I dont know much about what to feed the .5 inch one other than pin heaed crickets because ive never had a tarantula that small.
 

jeff1962

Arachnobaron
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I feed my tiny ones freshly killed small cricks, and just remove what they don't eat every couple days . I have a curly sling that pulls them down the burrow it has dug, she is a blast to watch.
 

josh_cloud

Arachnoknight
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i've been feeding all my slings termites. i feed them 1 to 2 termites daily. i was suprised too when i recieved .5" slings!
 

Mushroom Spore

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i've been feeding all my slings termites. i feed them 1 to 2 termites daily.
That is WAY too much.

OP, a good easy general rule is to feed X amount per week, where X is...oh, say, food enough to cover the spider's carapace? That sounds about right. My adult rosehair will take two-three large crickets, and my 2.5" juvie Ts (G. aureostriata and L. parahybana) will each get one cricket a week. My adult GBB gets 3, which is a little more than her carapace, but she's a big eater.

You can also space it out; sometimes I give my GBB six crickets every two weeks, or a small army of crickets once a month. Same policy for the rosehair, though it's more prone to small appetite these days, now that it's fed and molted and recovered from being a wild-caught pet store animal. Spacing out feeding saves me from making a ton of trips to the pet store.

I don't do that with the babies, though. They have a tupperware of prekilled crickets in my freezer. :)
 

Mina

Arachnoking
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They only need to be fed once a week. We didn't know any better and were feeding out slings 3 times a week, as a result we had an A. purpurea moult out to a mature male in less than 2 years, and he was a small male.
 

tin man

Arachnobaron
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They only need to be fed once a week. We didn't know any better and were feeding out slings 3 times a week, as a result we had an A. purpurea moult out to a mature male in less than 2 years, and he was a small male.
I don't think that would be to healthy for the tarantula
 

josh_cloud

Arachnoknight
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That is WAY too much.

OP, a good easy general rule is to feed X amount per week, where X is...oh, say, food enough to cover the spider's carapace? That sounds about right. My adult rosehair will take two-three large crickets, and my 2.5" juvie Ts (G. aureostriata and L. parahybana) will each get one cricket a week. My adult GBB gets 3, which is a little more than her carapace, but she's a big eater.

You can also space it out; sometimes I give my GBB six crickets every two weeks, or a small army of crickets once a month. Same policy for the rosehair, though it's more prone to small appetite these days, now that it's fed and molted and recovered from being a wild-caught pet store animal. Spacing out feeding saves me from making a ton of trips to the pet store.

I don't do that with the babies, though. They have a tupperware of prekilled crickets in my freezer. :)
i feed my slings as much as they want. termites are small. my .75 in gbb looks hillarious when he, or she snatches up 5 at once! they'll tell you how much they want. my gbb sling hasn't eaten in a week and a half. i still offer every few days. just as in nature there are times of plenty and times where the pickin' is slim. they're built for it!:cool:
 

Mushroom Spore

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i feed my slings as much as they want...they'll tell you how much they want...they're built for it!:cool:
Yes, they are built for times of plenty and times of little. They are binge eaters, which means that they are designed to eat food whenever it presents itself, in case they don't see food again for six months.

Which means that offering them food every single day is pretty much the *opposite* of what they were built for. They don't have a particularly good off switch when it comes to eating, because in nature they generally won't need it. If you keep stuffing them constantly, you're going to powerfeed them all into obesity and massively shortened lifespans. Tarantulas grow with each molt, therefore technically only age with each molt, and they only have so many molts in them before they die (especially noticeable if male).

Yours probably only stop eating because they've been rushed into premolt. Because that's what they "want"--to eat enough food that they can power a molt, and thereby grow and mature a little more, becoming large enough to breed and continue the species. That's about it. They don't care about living a long time, which is what *we* want.
 
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