Hello, Im pretty new to tarantula owning and took a great fascination in it. I had a tarantula; a chilean rosehair i believe it's called for a a year and half. She passed away a few days ago. After her death I decided to join this community and better my skills of T care. I'm looking for some help from T owners that can provide information about trustworthy websites to get tarantulas, basic care for one, substrate, lamp or heating pad (or both), and things like that. For food as well, I only have access to local crickets and mice( which I heard aren't too good for them). Any information concerning this topic is greatly appreciated. I hope to learn more from experienced owners on this site! thanks!
I'm new; looking for advice from experienced T owners
- Thread starter noelr
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spiderengineer
Arachnoangel
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as far as the best information I would recommend the tarantula keeper guide. its consider the bible for T keeping at least it is the best place to start with all your question. as far as were to get your next T. unfortunately we not allowed to discuss it in this section of the forum. their is a review, sell, section located farther down in the front page that you should check out.
spiderengineer
Arachnoangel
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If you want you can always PM me with questions/concerns and I can try to help get you situated!
DVMT
Arachnosquire
- Joined
- Oct 12, 2012
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I'll touch on some basics for ya.
Crickets are fine for pretty much every T out there, just DO NOT get the calcium dusting if they offer it. Good for reptiles, bad for T's
No heat lamps or pads, reference the TKG for temps on specific sp.
Coco fiber, vermiculite, sphagnum moss are all good. The blend you use depends on what works best for your environmental conditions and the requirements of the T you are housing. While an arboreal T that likes higher humidity, sphagnum blended with coco fiber offers slightly better moisture retention. But a GBB, rosea, or brachypelma would probably do better on coco fiber alone since they like it on the dryer side. The TKG also will give you prefered humidity levels on each sp.
You can most likely find a copy of the TKG at the local library for free. Along with other books on invertibrates, spiders, tarantulas that you can pull good info from.
They should always have some sort of hide, if 2" or bigger or arboreal I like a water dish, although they get a good amount of moisture from the crickets.
Terrestrials like more floor space and an enclosure that isnt too high, if you have an enclosure that is higher than 1 1/2 times the legspan of your terrestrial, fill in with more substrate until the 1 1/2 legspane requirement is met.
Arboreals like more height that floor space since they climb and are engineered to take falls better (unlike big butted terrestrials) and have different pads on the feet for climbing. A 4-5" arboreal should be in something maybe at least 8x8 but 16" in height or so. It really all depends again on the specific T.
Crickets are fine for pretty much every T out there, just DO NOT get the calcium dusting if they offer it. Good for reptiles, bad for T's
No heat lamps or pads, reference the TKG for temps on specific sp.
Coco fiber, vermiculite, sphagnum moss are all good. The blend you use depends on what works best for your environmental conditions and the requirements of the T you are housing. While an arboreal T that likes higher humidity, sphagnum blended with coco fiber offers slightly better moisture retention. But a GBB, rosea, or brachypelma would probably do better on coco fiber alone since they like it on the dryer side. The TKG also will give you prefered humidity levels on each sp.
You can most likely find a copy of the TKG at the local library for free. Along with other books on invertibrates, spiders, tarantulas that you can pull good info from.
They should always have some sort of hide, if 2" or bigger or arboreal I like a water dish, although they get a good amount of moisture from the crickets.
Terrestrials like more floor space and an enclosure that isnt too high, if you have an enclosure that is higher than 1 1/2 times the legspan of your terrestrial, fill in with more substrate until the 1 1/2 legspane requirement is met.
Arboreals like more height that floor space since they climb and are engineered to take falls better (unlike big butted terrestrials) and have different pads on the feet for climbing. A 4-5" arboreal should be in something maybe at least 8x8 but 16" in height or so. It really all depends again on the specific T.
- Joined
- Jul 16, 2004
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- 1,677
DID YOU HEAR THAT? THAT WAS THE NEWBIE ALARM!
Ah! So we're a newbie. You've done what everybody else does: Way overkill. You've spent a lot of money on things you shouldn't have. You've incorporated a few things that were useless or even dangerous. And, you're stressing out over meaningless details while ignoring the real issues. That's not a criticism, it's just the way humanoids are, I suppose. We can change that.
There's nothing wrong with being a newbie as long as you do something about it. After 45 years of keeping tarantulas, I still consider myself a newbie. We can trace a tarantula's ancestry back over HALF A BILLION YEARS. They've had that long to develop and fine tune their lives and lifestyles. They're incredibly complex and detailed creatures. We're gonna be playing catch-up (that's the newbie part) for a long, LONG, LONG time!
The first thing you need to understand is the KISS principle, not to infer that you're stupid. Inexperienced, maybe. Stupid, I don't think so; you can read, write, and use a computer just fine. But, I digress. As long as you supply the basic necessities of life for your captive tarantula, the less you incorporate into its cage and care regimen, the less there is to go tragically haywire. KISS, indeed!
The second thing you need to understand is that tarantulas are like no other creature you've ever kept or even heard about before. All your ingrained assumptions and prejudices don't apply to them, and may even be dangerous to them. They're not tropical fish, reptiles, birds, or hamsters, and you don't take care of them like any of those animals. One of the biggest problems with newbies is trying to get them to abandon all their prejudices and begin to look at the world from the vastly alien perspective of a huge, fuzzy spider.
FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT.
MAKE SURE YOUR SEAT BACK AND TRAY TABLE IS SECURED IN AN UPRIGHT POSITION.
THIS IS GOING TO BE ONE H*** OF A RIDE!
MAKE SURE YOUR SEAT BACK AND TRAY TABLE IS SECURED IN AN UPRIGHT POSITION.
THIS IS GOING TO BE ONE H*** OF A RIDE!
Because tarantulas are so bizarre and unique, you have a lot of preliminary homework to do. So, we begin. You need to read the following webpages.
1) Stan's Rant. ESPECIALLY, READ THE PART ABOUT NOT TRUSTING ANYTHING A PET SHOP TELLS YOU! AND ESPECIALLY, [Strike]READ[/Strike] STUDY, EVEN COMPARE AND CONTRAST THE FOUR RECOMMENDED BOOKS.
2) Myths.... Read the entire webpage tree.
3) Care and Husbandry of the Chilean Rose Tarantula. Even if you're never going to keep a rose this webpage holds a lot of advice that 's applicable to nearly every other desert tarantula.
4) Substrate because you need to know about this very basic part of a tarantula's existence.
5) If you can possibly spare the time, at least skim through the entire Spiders, Calgary website.
Another of my rants. Tarantulas don't have hair. Only mammals have hair. In fact, it's a diagnostic feature (like paired occipital condyles) of being a mammal. If tarantulas are anything, it's not a mammal!
Tarantulas posses setae (currently used, formal term) or bristles (a much older term now relegated to the vernacular).
Sorry to hear this. I never cease to be amazed at how profoundly we feel about losing a "stupid spider!" And yet, I feel the same about the loss of one of my pets.
WELCOME TO THE HOBBY!
WELCOME TO THE COMMUNITY!
WELCOME TO THIS FORUM!
Well, you wanted it, you got it, Toyota! (With all apologies to the car manufacturer.
But, you developed and advertised the adage and it's now a solid part of Americana!)Read those webpages. Read the books. STUDY THE BOOKS! And, as a gentle hint, learn to use the search function on these forums. No, that's not going to overcome the limitations of something as informal as a brief answer or discussion here. (See the discussion of this in Stan's Rant.) But it will give you an opportunity to keep abreast of current events (those books are all several years old and slowly becoming more and more obsolete), and to ask individualized questions about your particular set of circumstances.
Nothing really wrong with crickets. Sort of a universal manna for tarantulas. Enthusiasts have been using them for tarantula food for over 50 years now. We've managed to breed several hundred different kinds of tarantulas by feeding them crickets alone. Gut-loading (do a search) is useless or meaningless. The crickets are apparently a balanced diet for tarantulas all by themselves. Don't bother with calcium supplement either. Tarantulas don't need a lot of calcium.
The dominant hypothesis is that tarantulas cannot tolerate large concentrations of calcium from the mouse's skeleton in their diets. This is another myth. Somewhen, somewhere, somebody feed their tarantula a mouse. The tarantula had a bad molt next time around (the usual excuse for claiming this myth), and the only remarkable thing that stood out in the enthusiast's mind was the struggle between the tarantula and the mouse. An assumption was made, and the myth sprang into being like a big, ugly toadstool!
The fact is that many of us, perhaps many MANY of us, have regularly fed mice to our tarantulas over the last 50 or 60 years that the hobby has been in existence, and have experienced no problems whatsoever attributable to the practice. And, there are literally tens of thousands of enthusiasts who have never fed mice to any of their tarantulas who report molting problems anyway.
Lastly, there are a number of exceptionally large tarantulas who seem to make a regular practice of eating small vertebrates (frogs, toads, mice, etc.) in their native habitats. If there were anything really wrong with tarantulas eating vertebrates these tarantulas would either have gone extinct eons ago, or developed some sort of resistance or tolerance for large amounts of calcium in their diets. Based on the simple observation that tens of thousands of enthusiasts worldwide are now keeping hundreds of thousands to millions of pet tarantulas even as we hold this conversation, it doesn't appear that extinction was the end result.
But nothing about tarantulas is ever that simple. (They've simply had far to much time to complicate and fine tune their lives!) Few of us feed mice to our tarantulas as a sole diet. Mice tend to be expensive to buy and very troublesome to raise. Hence, mice are most commonly used only by a relatively small portion of enthusiasts, and usually only for exceptionally large tarantulas.
And, when feeding mice to tarantulas it is important to feed only very, VERY young mice, babies or slightly older, that have not yet learned to use their teeth as weapons. It is considered very bad form in the arachnoculture hobby to risk a valued and valuable pet in a fight to the death with a larger mouse. It is interesting to note, however, that small or baby frozen mice are available from some pet shops (look for those that cater to the exotics trade), and there are frequent reports of tarantulas quickly learning to eat them once they are thawed and reach room temperature. (But, NEVER attempt to microwave a mouse unless you have some perverse necessity to either clean up a very messy microwave, or buy a new one!)
There is one possibly valid criticism of feeding mice to tarantulas: Tarantulas fed regularly on mice always become obese. The fact is that there is no data on whether obesity has any bad effects on tarantulas (as there is in humans). We simply don't know. And, we can't make an educated guess based on other animals because spiders in general and tarantulas in particular are so different, even bizarre. There are lots of other instances where they have violated the rules followed by other creatures on Earth, and seem to be surviving with panache anyway! The only thing we think we know for sure is that a really obese tarantula can't be all that comfortable with all that bulk and weight, just like we.
Is there any real justification for feeding your tarantula a mouse? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Occasionally, enthusiasts acquire fully grown giant tarantulas (e.g., Theraphosa blondi - goliath birdeater tarantulas, or Lasiodora parahybana -Brazilian salmon tarantulas) that refuse smaller food like crickets or even cockroaches. For them, small mice may be the only option.
Some enthusiasts are concerned that their tarantulas may require a more varied diet for various reasons, and choose to feed an occasional baby mouse to their tarantula as a dietary supplement. But, there is virtually no hard data on the dietary needs of tarantulas in general, or known dietary deficiency diseases among them with the single exception of feeding solely fruit flies to baby tarantulas. So, there is still some question about the necessity or efficacy of feeding mice to most tarantulas.
I hope this helps and gets you restarted on the right foot. Your little 8-legged tutor will be giving you spot quizzes daily!
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I appreciate it; ill definetly keep that in mind!
---------- Post added 03-04-2013 at 07:04 PM ----------
thanks for the advice. helped a lot!
---------- Post added 03-04-2013 at 07:09 PM ----------
Very detailed response Pikaia! I read the whole thing and found what you said very fascinating. And thanks for welcoming me! I will definetly take a another few hard looks at your answer and see what to take from it.
---------- Post added 03-04-2013 at 07:04 PM ----------
thanks for the advice. helped a lot!
---------- Post added 03-04-2013 at 07:09 PM ----------
Very detailed response Pikaia! I read the whole thing and found what you said very fascinating. And thanks for welcoming me! I will definetly take a another few hard looks at your answer and see what to take from it.
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You know I've been meaning to buy this. Only thing is I want to buy the latest edition which I believe is the 3rd? But I can never tell on Amazon what edition any of the books are. A close look at the cover on the listing you posted says "revised edition" but is that 2nd revision or 3rd?
spiderengineer
Arachnoangel
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- Apr 22, 2012
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- 998
I honestly didn't check at first just pasted the first one that google pop up, but looking farther down on the publication info it says third edition of the link I posted.
---------- Post added 03-04-2013 at 08:00 PM ----------
you have to go all the way down past the review and it has publication information and it says its 3rd edition 2009 so that should be the most updated one.
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- Jul 16, 2004
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Order it directly from the publisher. They only sell the very latest edition. See The Tarantula Keeper's Guide for the full story about the confusion over the edition number. Using the info in this last webpage tree you can determine publication dates, the ISBN, and each edition's appearance to make sure you're getting the one you want.
You can often get copies of the older versions (for historical reference and to complete your library) from places like
Abe Books
Alibris
Book Finder
Booksprice
... or perform an Internet search for used books for sale.
Lastly, did you know that there are Aftermarket Support Pages for each edition so far? [size=+1]FREE![/size] The Aftermarket Support Page for the latest edition of the book, for instance, contains all the material that we had to cut out of the printed edition to bring it down to marketable size. I know of no other author or literary works that have done this. Effectively, you end up with almost twice the book you paid for! Look on each edition's individual page for a link.
(Click or right-click the thumbnail to see a larger image.)
(Photo courtesy of Jamie Owens. Way to go Amy!)
Enjoy your little 8-legged literary buddy!
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