A. hentzi and water

I've had my Texas Brown tarantula (A. hentzi) for about a year and I haven't had any issues with keeping a water bowl in her habitat. However, this last month has been a bit of a battle.
She initially buried her dish, which I was just going to deal with. Then she burrowed underneath the buried dish. At that point I relocated it, since the only thing keeping it from crashing on top of her was the tension between the dish and the substrate.
Now she keeps webbing around and inside the water dish, which is wicking all of the water out. It usually takes only a couple of hours for the dish to be empty again. I've only been filling it once or twice a week and leaving it dry the rest of the time.

Any thoughts on the importance of consistent water for this species? Her substrate has some moisture from all of the water being pulled into it, but she definitely doesn't have a steady source of clean water anymore.

Your doing all you can do. Some T's you have to persistently do water dish maintenance. For these specimens I take the dish out, clean it up and replace once a week. Grammostola are bad about filling the dish with dirt.

IMO unless you can replicate morning dew a water dish is necessary for all of your T's regardless the species

Mariner1 said:

I've had my A. hentzi since November and it has never burrowed or touched it's water bowl from what I've seen. I t has also not put down any webbing except for a small amount when I feed it and it starts doing the feeding waltz.

Click to expand...

Just because you've never seen it doesn't mean it didn't happen. I have seen my T's drink many, many times. Seen them literally run to a freshly filled dish and plunge in face first.

I just put another dish in and leave the old one for it to mess with.

Normal behavior that a t owner just needs to deal with. I have a B. smithi that never messed with its dish, now in the last few weeks, its getting filled with sub almost daily. I have a P. cam that I never saw out, much less near the dish, yup, the other day I look in and its filled with substrate. Got a G. pulchripes that normally leaves the dish alone, but periodically, its either dumped, full of sub, or webbed to the sub. I could go on, but it would be pointless repetition, aside from the species involved.

A second dish is a good alternative.

I'll give a second water dish a try!

I assumed this was pretty normal behavior, especially with the major excavation she's undertaken. She's dug a decent sized burrow and all that substrate has to go somewhere! This is my first T though, so I wasn't sure if there was something else I could (or should) do to handle the water situation. XD

My wife and I have kept many A hentzis before. They do love digging so make sure you have the proper housing for it, depth is more important than width for this species.

My south Texas Aphonopelma has at least two water bowls buried in her tank. I've given up and just taken to pouring water in a corner.

My Aphonopelma Hentzis do the same. Actually All 4 females different ages have been doing this for about a month now some kind of seasonal time clock or they might scense a weather change. My Hentzis seem to know a couple days before a heavy rain they will all climb the sides of there enclosure. As for watering I have been waiting a few days moving water dish and refilling. So now I water once a week . As long as there substrate doesn't become saturated.They will become wall spiders if substrate is to wet .

She sealed herself into her burrow yesterday afternoon, so I'm pretty sure she's been prepping to molt this whole time. I cleaned her dish yesterday after she shut herself in and refilled it.