What To Feed Your Pet Tarantula
What kinds of foods do tarantulas like to eat? What should you feed it?
Tarantulas like eating life food. They particularly enjoy feasting on a nice cricket or two. You can buy these crickets at most pet stores or bait stores. That is their most commonly eaten and most popular treats. However, tarantulas also like foods like cockroaches, moths, insects, and mealworms. Again, you can get these foods at a pet or bait shop.
The largest food these spiders will eat is pinkie mice. Large tarantulas enjoy these once in awhile. But you need to make sure you remove any uneaten prey from their homes if they're still there after one day.
As you can imagine, tarantulas can be expensive to care for. It may cross your mind to catch your own tarantula food. If you choose to do this, make sure there are no pesticides on the food. It's often difficult to tell whether a particular insect has pesticide on it. But unless you're absolutely sure it's safe, don't feed it to your spider. It can quickly get sick.
You should feed your young tarantula no more than twice or three times a week. Once your tarantula is an adult, it can live fine on only feeding once or twice a week.
One rule to follow when feeding a tarantula is to not feed it anything that is larger than it is. If you want to feed it something that is half its size, that is plenty big.
Also, you'll want to make sure your tarantula has plenty of water to drink. You can probably get away with giving it a small container of water that is just big enough for it to drink from. They don't need much water. They'll mainly get the moisture they need from the air and from the food they're eating.
There will be periods of time during which your tarantula won't eat for months. But you don't need to worry, because that's normal. It's just going through a moulting stage. This is when the tarantula removes its old layer of skin and grows new skin. You shouldn't force your tarantula, nor be concerned, when it doesn't want to eat. Just make sure there is no prey in the tank with them when they go through this stage. Their skin gets very soft, and crickets tend to eat their skin if given the chance.