I guess that's makes a certain amount of sense. Like stuffing the filling back in a sandwich.
My P. cambridgei slings are very fond of doing this, along with another interesting behavior: Once they catch their crickets, they'll drag them down into their web palaces, drop their crickets, web them up thoroughly, then they will crawl up to the mouths of their web palaces and seal off the openings. Only after they have completed that little ritual will they resume eating. It would appear that they have perfected the art of not being interrupted during a meal. :biggrin: :laugh:Yep, pretty normal, like CB said, to hold the prey item together.. some of my Ts will kill a feeder, instantly drop it and start webbing al over it and pick it up again
One too many calls from a telemarketer, I guess! :laugh:
This has been my thought too. Also to add to the stories of tarantula feeding behavior. Many of the aggressive feeding tarantulas I have had over the years have gone a killing spree killing all of the crickets in the cage, piled them up, webbed the pile together, than began feeding. Periodically during feeding, they stopped to re-web the mass together. I still have an immature female Brachypelma vagans that does this. It has about a 3 inch legspan and will run around and kill the 6 crickets I provide it, bundle them together, then feed. My adult female Theraphosa stirmi with a 9 inch legspan will do the same thing with about 12 crickets put into it's cage.
Wow. Silk is amazing stuff. Is there anything it can't do?
Clean up the leftover cricket parts.
That's a large part of it. The other is that if the prey revives, it's too tangled up and restrained to escape. Except for slings and young juveniles, I give my spiders multiple crickets. In their rush to catch them all, some aren't as disabled mechanically and chemically as others. Wrapping them in a silk net ensures that the spider keeps all of them. Keeping prey in a compact ball also keeps it off the ground, and makes ants less likely to discover it and take possession (the hyenas of the insect world).