B. smithi likes the pink

I just got back from a reptile show. I usually try to buy a different feeder for variety which tends to be silk worms but this time no one had silk worms but live pinkies were 3 for a buck. As soon as I got home I went straight for my B. smithi's enclosure. This tarantula has been an aggressive feeder since I acquired it and I was curious to see what it would do when offered a pinky.

I placed the pinky onto the substrate and the spider ran over and picked it up, no fangs(yet), then set it back down and rolled the pinky around with its palps. The pinky was oblivious to what was actually going on and appeared to be trying to crawl under and suckle from the underside of the spider which is the point where the smithi fanged it. Thisbeing my first time offering pinkies I wasn't prepared for the squeaking that started and stopped in about 10 seconds. I felt kind of bad for a minute as I'm not a particularly heartless person and having looked at the pinkies more closely they are quite cute and defenseless BUT my T's need to eat and the bad feelings were quickly replaced with an urge to run for my camera.......

cool pic. i don't offer my t's pinkeys often. how long did it take for the spider to finish? it took my h.lividum(now departed) around 7 hours. i did'ent ear any noise form the pinkey, but i did noitce that it tryed to suckle.

Smithi likes the pink...

Mmmmm, yummy! :}

cichlidsman said:

cool pic. i don't offer my t's pinkeys often. how long did it take for the spider to finish? it took my h.lividum(now departed) around 7 hours. i did'ent ear any noise form the pinkey, but i did noitce that it tryed to suckle.

Click to expand...

I posted the pic 5 minutes after I took it so I don't know how long its going to take to finish. I doubt I'll offer pinkies again anytime soon if at all. It was one of those things I wanted to do once and it would have felt like a wasted trip to the show if I didn't bring back something different for the brood to eat. I bought nine pinkies and I have one left. My L. parahybana, A. geniculata, P. regalis, T. blondi and N. colloratovillosus all took them with a great amount of zeal. I did have some T's that weren't interested like my G. rosea, B. albopilosum and one of my male L. parahybana. The rest of my Ts are too small to even consider trying to feed them a pinkie.

That is a cool pic and a beautiful smithi.

very nice tarantula and picture

Very cool pic, and a great Smithi you have there.

Does anyone have any expierences with A.Semmani taking pinkies?

ShaunHolder said:

Very cool pic, and a great Smithi you have there.

Does anyone have any expierences with A.Semmani taking pinkies?

Click to expand...

i never tryed but im sure it will eat it. mine is a very agressive eater.

Buspirone said:

Thisbeing my first time offering pinkies I wasn't prepared for the squeaking that started and stopped in about 10 seconds. I felt kind of bad for a minute as I'm not a particularly heartless person and having looked at the pinkies more closely they are quite cute and defenseless BUT my T's need to eat and the bad feelings were quickly replaced with an urge to run for my camera.......

Click to expand...

Yup, I feel your pain. I had a similar experience the first time I fed pinkies to my Leopard Gecko and White's Tree Frog.

I can appreciate your sentiments towards the pinkie for sure, but after having worked in a pet store that sold live feeders I've come to think there are at least a couple of kinds of herp keepers.

1) The kind who give live food or whole, pre-stunned or pre-killed food to meet the natural dietary needs of their animals. When these people give live, moving food they appreciate watching their animals hunt as a means of admiring the stealth, grace, etc involved. It's more an act of admiring their animal than anything else.

2) The kind who give live food because they like watching the prey item get killed. These people apprecieate the hunt in a different way. The way some of them talk about how much they enjoy it, I wouldn't be shocked at all to find they more than a little "thrill" out of it.

Oh, and then there's the kind who feed vegetables to their millipedes and iguanas because that's what they eat.

OMG!! what a nice tarantula.. its cool feeding it pinkies but... well its kinda cruel though.. but... hey its cool!