Is fish a good meal for a T ?

bokgrasul

Arachnosquire
Old Timer
Joined
Feb 4, 2006
Messages
102
Hy!
Now it's winter, as you all noticed.... {D
And the food for my biggests T's is kinda hard to find.
So i tried to feed them with small fish , that are easy to find in every bait-store for fishermans.
Is fish a good food for a couple of months until something else appears on the market?
My next question is : a few days ago I put in the enclosure of my adult Acanthoscuria geniculata a fish , that normally she will attack and eat it right-away.
Only this time things were going wrong.... the fish was a little too big , and a little to jumpy and the T got scared and didn't touched the fish for 2 days.
Finally remembered the fish ( that after 2 days was definetly started to rotten and stink ) and tried to get it out.
But ,surprize : the T was eating the corpse of the dead fish . After 2 (maybe 3) days!!!
Is this dangerous for the T to eat an .....rotten fish? She ate it all!!! And she wasn't hungry , she is fed about once at 3 days, and she is a mature female, big and pretty.
Should I expect some ...repercusions? Diareea or something? {D
 

cacoseraph

ArachnoGod
Old Timer
Joined
Jan 5, 2005
Messages
8,325
Hy!
Now it's winter, as you all noticed.... {D
I have only heard about winter from other people. In southern California, USA it just seems to rain more for part of the year, hehehe

And the food for my biggests T's is kinda hard to find.
it sounds like you might want to consider a colony of crickets (yuck!) or roaches (mmm, nice roaches)

So i tried to feed them with small fish , that are easy to find in every bait-store for fishermans.
Is fish a good food for a couple of months until something else appears on the market?
i would say fish might make a good supplement, but would be probably fairly terrible as the only thing you feed your tarantula. generally speaking predator/scavengers are built to eat a certain range or group of food. i believe that tarantulas are built to eat a mostly invertebrate diet, with supplementation of small vertebrate prey they catch. additional supplementation from scavaging seems likely for tarantulas that wander around a bit at night looking for food.

My next question is : a few days ago I put in the enclosure of my adult Acanthoscuria geniculata a fish , that normally she will attack and eat it right-away.
Only this time things were going wrong.... the fish was a little too big , and a little to jumpy and the T got scared and didn't touched the fish for 2 days.
Finally remembered the fish ( that after 2 days was definetly started to rotten and stink ) and tried to get it out.
well, i would try to keep up with cage maintenance a little better. that could have filled your cage with mold in the wrong conditions. no harm done it seems, though

But ,surprize : the T was eating the corpse of the dead fish . After 2 (maybe 3) days!!!
Is this dangerous for the T to eat an .....rotten fish? She ate it all!!! And she wasn't hungry , she is fed about once at 3 days, and she is a mature female, big and pretty.
Should I expect some ...repercusions? Diareea or something? {D
[/QUOTE]
GENERALLY speaking, animals don't eat things that will make them sick. further, there is decent evidence that tarantulas will scavange things that are too big for them to kill themselves. since they could be built to be scavengers then they might have built in defences against getting sick. vultures and such are built to eat rotting corpses that would easily kill most other animals.

interesting like, observation
 

Merfolk

Arachnoprince
Old Timer
Joined
Dec 13, 2005
Messages
1,323
I will try shrimps and other crustaceans. Since they are arthropods, they are closer to the usual T food than, say, mice!!!

If you feed goldfishes and else, you should either do it rarely, or quarantine it for a while before giving it. Some of them are soaked with chemical, they build up to a dangerous level if you feed these often!
 

cacoseraph

ArachnoGod
Old Timer
Joined
Jan 5, 2005
Messages
8,325
I will try shrimps and other crustaceans. Since they are arthropods, they are closer to the usual T food than, say, mice!!!

If you feed goldfishes and else, you should either do it rarely, or quarantine it for a while before giving it. Some of them are soaked with chemical, they build up to a dangerous level if you feed these often!
um... small rodentia skeletons or pieces thereof are found in various tarantula burrows in most of the continents they occur in. this is fact.


also, there is something wrong with the gold colored feeder goldfish and i have seen them contraindicated many times by knowledgeable people. i would not use them, period
 

Hedorah99

Arachnoprince
Old Timer
Joined
May 2, 2005
Messages
1,863
I will try shrimps and other crustaceans. Since they are arthropods, they are closer to the usual T food than, say, mice!!!

If you feed goldfishes and else, you should either do it rarely, or quarantine it for a while before giving it. Some of them are soaked with chemical, they build up to a dangerous level if you feed these often!
Yea, mice occur on forest floors where as shrimp do not. I still do not feed them to my T,s, but they will be taken in the wild.
 

Fingolfin

Arachnoangel
Old Timer
Joined
Jul 9, 2006
Messages
796
I fed a crab to my mature male G. rosea a decade ago.... just a baby crab really. He did eat him right away, split the shell open and ate the meat out from inside. It was pretty interesting actually. He didn't get sick or anything. I wouldn't do it now, knowing more, but at least I found out they would eat them...
 

LimaMikeSquared

Arachnobaron
Old Timer
Joined
Mar 25, 2006
Messages
315
i remember reading about someone in an area who could not get crickets etc. used mince meat squished into little balls, as far as i know the t was thriving on it.
 

cacoseraph

ArachnoGod
Old Timer
Joined
Jan 5, 2005
Messages
8,325
i remember reading about someone in an area who could not get crickets etc. used mince meat squished into little balls, as far as i know the t was thriving on it.
the problem is that T's are double tough in some regards... so malnutrition might take a while to manifest... but i sort of suspect that by the time the symptoms are gross enough to notice then some sort of permanent injury will have been done. so when someone says their tarantula is thriving you *really* need to ask them how long they have been doing it. also, there is a HUGE difference between their diet being all ground beef with NO bugs versus 95% ground beef with a couple crickets every year.

"meat" is generally muscle tissue, iirc. muscle tissue, while complex compared to atoms and stuff is *very* simple when compared to a whole bug with chitin and a nervous system and those lovely antenna, adigestive system, rudimentary respiratory system, etc. when consumed whole, a bug provides all kinds of building blocks and nutrients and minerals for a growing tarantula

... hmm, i suspect malnutrition would manifest faster in a growing spiderling or juvenile, compared to an essentially max size spider.
 

EDED

Arachnobaron
Old Timer
Joined
Aug 12, 2004
Messages
549
shrimp works well

thaw it, remove the shell, rinse it well, dab it to dry with a papertowel

cut it into a reasonable size and gently offer infront of the spider

some will refuse to eat dead things, MOST of my spiders readily take shrimp as a meal, juvies to large adults.

fattens them up fast, much better than rodents, and dont have to worry about leftovers (exoskeletons of crickets, fur/bones of rodents etc) if the shrimp size is not too big. Recent eggsacs and many successful molts from various species in my collection that were fed alot of shrimp show that shrimp diet does not affect badly in terms of the spider growth and eggs development.

i only do this for fattening purpose for WC spiders or mated spiders

i was first told this method from a hobbyist in Denmark
 

arachnocat

Arachnoangel
Old Timer
Joined
Nov 27, 2005
Messages
792
Thanks for the info. I have a rather skinny big T. blondi. She doesn't seem to eat her crickets and I don't want to feed her only mice. I'm not allowed to keep roaches so it's nice to know there's an alternative food for her!
What kind of shrimp do you use? Are the live or frozen?
 
Last edited:

LimaMikeSquared

Arachnobaron
Old Timer
Joined
Mar 25, 2006
Messages
315
so when someone says their tarantula is thriving you *really* need to ask them how long they have been doing it.
as i said i read it somewhere i think on another forum - about year ago, so i believe that is what it said, however i may well be wrong, and things may have changed since then.


i have found that locust of the right size go down quite well with my mums and my t's - dont know how good a substitute they would be.
 

arachnocat

Arachnoangel
Old Timer
Joined
Nov 27, 2005
Messages
792
Hmm. We can't get live locusts in the US (unless you catch some yourself) but I have seen canned ones that are for reptiles. I wonder if those would work.
 

LimaMikeSquared

Arachnobaron
Old Timer
Joined
Mar 25, 2006
Messages
315
over here we buy them in the reptile shop, like we do the crickets you could try looking for some online suppliers which deliver out.
 

Merfolk

Arachnoprince
Old Timer
Joined
Dec 13, 2005
Messages
1,323
At least, the info about rodents bones in T's nests in the wild contradicts those folks saying that T's hardly ever eat verts, how wrong it is...but I do believe that most of the species though to need feeders mice (t blondi for example) are not big rodents eaters (rather frogs and else) and that the bulk of their diet is mostly arthropods! Still goes along common sense I think;)
 
Top