All tarantulas are carnivores and need animals to feed on. If you are not prepared to sacrifice food animals to the pet tarantula, then don’t even think about buying a spider. There are no vegetarians amongst the arachnides! There are plenty of other fascinating crawly creepies that eat leafs, fruit and seeds. Leaf insects and stick insects for instance live on brambles, oak and acorn.

The staple diet for my spiders are crickets and locusts as well as flies. For small spiderlings like Brachypelma I use fruit flies and young crickets. For the very large spiders I use mice, although this has several disadvantages as I will explain a bit further down in this chapter. All these animals can be bought in the well equipped pet shop or ordered through the internet. insects can be sent by mail and arrive in a small chirping package.... your postman will wonder what’s in there *grin*. However, as a spider collection grows, more and more food animals are required, so at a certain point it may be good to think about starting a small cricket ranch to lower the cost of the hobby. Here are some of my experiences with food animals.

Fruitflies

Starting a culture on ordinary fruit flies may be cheaper, but co-habiting with hundereds of escaped flies may be not such a good idea.There are two varieties of fruitflies available which are unable to fly. Drosophila melanogaster has crippeled flies that make it impossible to fly, Drosophila hydei has fully formed wings, but the muscles that drive the wings in a normal fly are underdeveloped. D. melanogaster has a shorter development cycle but I found that this variety quite happily develops normal wings in the second or third generation. Also I found them quite “jumpy” and more difficult to dispense to the spiders than D. hydei. So, I stopped breeding D. melanogaster entirely and focussed on D. hydei. This species has a longer development cycle (approx. 3 weeks depending on the temperature) but the population once it is established is quite stable with few or no flying individuals at all.

For starting a culture of D. hydei I bought the animals in a pet shop. There are far more than 200 fruitflies in one package, plenty to start a breeding project. As food I use the following mixture, which is easy to prepare, cheap and has worked every single time since I started using it:

1/2 banana
3 tablespoons oatmeal
0.1% Nipagin M (retards the growth of fungus)

Squeeze the banana with added nipagin and add oatmeal until a thick mixture is obtained that is not runny anymore. The mixture is filled into a 1/2 L yoghurt jar with a transparent lid and some oatmeal is sprinkeled on the top. It’s important that the mixture is not too wet, otherwise the Drosophilas will get stuck. The added sprinkle of oatmeal on the top is also to prevent the flies from sticking to the mixture. Now add about 150 flies put the lid on the jar and punch a few small holes in the lid. That’s it. I don’t even add things like hey for the flies to climb. They do quite nicely without and it’s easier to get the flies out once they hatch.

Fruitflies take about 10 days after hatching until they start to mate. This means it may be necessary to transfer them onto a new mixture should mould develop. After reaching sexual maturity the flies will lay eggs and soon the mixture will be crawling with fly maggots. Should the mixture be consumed entirely by the maggots, simply add a small piece of banana and they are happy again. After 2 weeks of feeding the maggots develop into small brown pupae and will remain motionless for about another week. Then the young flies hatch and the cycle starts again. I usually have 3 jars of fruit flies going at different stages of development. This ensures a continuous supply of food for my spiderlings.

As for the substrate, there are many different recipies available in the internet. Some of them are so complex mixtures that probably only a biological lab will be able to use them because accurate scales and exotic chemicals are needed, both of which are quite unavailable to the hobby-arachnologist. Commercial mixtures are also available. Just add water and the food for the flies is ready. However, this is expensive food and so far I have seen not a single reason to switch from the simple oatmeal/banana mix to a commercial mix. Bananas are the natural diet for fruitflies, anyway.

Crickets

Crickets are the staple diet for most of my spiders. Therefore I considered the advantages and drawbacks of the different cricket species before I decided to start a cricket breeding project. Probably the most annoying thing about crickets is that adult males chirp loudly in their search for a suiting female. This chirping sound can be heared through closed doors, even in neighboring rooms. Therefore I take the males out first until everything is quiet. Since only a few males are needed to breed all the females this can be done without too much harm to the population.

House crickets (Acheta domestica) are probably the most easy crickets to keep. However before starting to breed hundereds of those little insects one should consider that they also quite happily multiply in the kitchen behind the fridge, in the bathroom and other cosy places in your flat. And there is always an opportunity for a few of them to escape. That’s why I decided against this species.

Another cricket species which (according to the experience of other tarantula keepers) is unable to multiply at room temperature and in the relatively dry conditions of a flat is Gryllus assimilis.I have just started to breed this species of crickets, but it seems to be working rather nicely. I will post more here as I gain more experience. Here is what I have so far:

I keep the crickets in a plastic box with egg crates as hiding places and a wet kitchen towel for them to drink water. The kitchen towel has the advantage that I can throw it away once it is dry and any eggs that have been layed in it will dry out and die. Food for the crickets is fish food that is used for large fish ponds. They eat that quite happily.

For egg laying I fill plastic vials with moist cocos fibre substrate and place a few adult female crickets in there. The vial is closed with a sponge so that the animals can’t escape. The females plunge their ovipositor into the ground almost immediately and start laying eggs. After approx. 24 hours many of the pale brownish eggs are visible in the brown soil. Then I take the crickets out and place the vials in a warm place. Incubation time is approx. 3 weeks at 28°C day temperature. Depending on the temoerature and humidity level in the air it may be necessary to moisten the soil once or twice during the incubation period. When the small crickets hatch they are about 2 mm long, 1 mm wide and have a black color. They are already fed the same fish food as the adults. At this stage they are ideal food for very small spiderlings of ground dwelling species like Brachypelma.The little crickets grow quickly and when they reach a size of about 4 mm I transfer them to a cricket box with an egg crate in it. There they continue to grow and serve Fas food for a variety of tarantula sizes.

Flies

Flies and their maggots are good food for a variety of spiders, although I have to say that not all of my tarantulas accept them as food. Also I have heared that spiders don’t do well on a sole diet of maggots and flies. On the other hand, Grammostola rosea even eats the immovable brown pupae. Motion here does not seem to be the stimulus necessary to start the hunting behaviour. For arboreal tarantulas the flies are an almost ideal food as they usually sit on the roof of the tarantulas cage, close to its web. This avoids the problem of how the food gets to the spider (crickets run around on the ground and the spider sits on the ceiling and does not catch them).

The fly maggots are readily available in every fishing shop for just a few cents. This is a huge advantage over other food animals, especially for people with large collections of spiders. Once bought, the maggots are transferred to a yoghurt jar that is half filled with corn flour and has a clear lid with air holes in it. The maggots dig into the flour almost immediately and most of them disappear from sight. It’s easy now to catch them one by one out of the flour and feed them to the spiders. All the maggots that remain in the jar will become immovable brown pupae within a few days, depending on the developmental stage of the maggots that were bought initially. The pupae rest for about a week and then fat black fies hatch out of them. The yield is amazing and usually I can feed all my animals that are large enough to accept this kind of food and still have many, many flies left over. But be careful! These flies CAN fly! Don’t make the mistake of opening the jar too far when taking out flies. One way of immobilizing the insects is to cool them in the refridgerator for a few minutes. Another is to use carbon dioxide gas to anesthesize them for a while.

Return to previous page

[Home] [Hobbies] [Arachnides] [Insects] [Reptiles] [Plants] [Photos] [Travel] [Links] [Contact] [History]