Hate to tell you, but its widely known it cuts females lifespan as well. It happens with true spiders, mantids, etc as well. But if you want to just do females, thats fine.
Power feeding will affect both females and males in the same way. I have no studies to back this up but I would conclude that males have a shorter life span in general. That is, they have fewer total instars than females. Molting frequency is affected by diet and the total number of instars is what governs an arthropods life span regardless of sex. It may be that males have fewer total instars than females, but both males and females molt frequency can be affected by diet.
It's just widely known that power feeding can make a male mature faster thus die faster.... Now I want to find out if the females life is cut that short by similar practices.
I know it is cut short I just want to find out if its as dramatic of an impact as a males.
What will you have to compare it to? Is there a chart here that says how much shorter a males lifespan is with powerfeeding? Include males, otherwise you can't say it shortens their lifespan AS MUCH as males.
learned a lot from you guys, just want to ask.. i'm feeding my 1cm g. rosea sling 1 pinhead cricket per day, sometimes it eats 2! i believe i'm powerfeeding it, and in the process, i'm shortening the overall lifespan of my T. but i heard that it's OK to powerfeed slings, although once they become juveniles, powerfeeding should be stopped. any thoughts? and just wondering, what is the advisable feeding frequency for 1-2cm slings based on your experiences?
I am not aware of any official studies published on the matter but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to confirm that power feeding does indeed increase the molting frequency of tarantulas which in turn decreases the over all life span. Just look at the examples of where people raised a Brachypelma spp. male to maturity in two or three years by power feeding when under normal circumstances it takes at least five years.
Aren't these kind of the same?
Yeah man, that's the study. Like I said, I couldn't remember all the specs. I just remember reading it some time ago. It sounds correct. The idea here is that their size is limited by oxygen levels. The question I am trying to pose is if oxygen determines the amount of molts that they can go through. Or is it just that they will grow larger with each molt but still have the same amount of molts? I thought about pumping high levels of oxygen into my spider room (I have access to pure O2). What stops me from doing so is the fear that it will work. If I max out the size of say... T. blondi due to oxygen levels, and I take the pure O2 away, will it be able to sustain life?
Aren't these kind of the same?
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Maybe I should have expanded. They breed better basically means that they have an easier time raping the female. My males are powerful as hell, alongside of being huge. They manhandle. Them being more aggressive is kind of the same thing, but a little different. They don't give up at all. Just recently (less than a month ago) I was watching a breeding of mine and the male had his hooks in and was dragging the female as she tried fighting him off. My males are definitely stronger than my females.
The Sickness
