Anyone feed spiders to their T's?

RedSkies

Arachnosquire
Old Timer
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Feb 23, 2006
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58
I am not a new member, I just can't for the life of me remember my username/password and the email provider I signed up under is no longer available to me. It's beeen a few months.

Anyway, I bought two slings awhile ago from NW Inverts. A baby Avic and a free Chaco Golden Knee Sling ;) . Unfortunatley, the Aviculara died about a month after I got it. It never even ate (I have no idea what I did wrong, I read the care sheets and stdied here. He was so cool too, all blue and velvety in his neat web), but the Chaco is doing great. I feed him about 1 cricket a week, plus bugs I find in the woods behind my house. He is now pretty big, probobly 3" stretched out.

The bugs I usually feed him lately are the fat orb weaver spiders that are all over the place around here. he jumps right on them, sometimes catching him out of the air. Today I caught a HUGE one. I didn't realize how big until I poured it into his keeper out of the cup. It's abdomen was as big as his. I was going to take it out when he tackled it. they tussled for a second or two, then my T ran for the hills like he was afraid. i went to retrieve the weaver...but I noticed it was staggering around drunkenly. it took about 10 steps and fell over dead. My T must have injected venom or pierced something rather important. he is now happily deflating the largest meal of his young life. Man, my spider is so cool. I dig him.

However, it didn't occur to me today to think that spiders may be unsafe food for my pet. Should I avoid doing this and stick to meeker bugs? I like the spiders because they are so plump, it's a nice meal. As for instecticides, they are never used in the woods behind my house, so I am not worried about that.
 

Taceas

Arachnolord
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May 12, 2006
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658
Spiders are top predators in the bug world. They eat anything that happens upon them. So just because the spider itself hasn't been sprayed with an insecticide doesn't mean it hasn't ingested them.

Most orb weavers catch flying prey, moths more specificially this time of year. Moths come from caterpillars. Caterpillars eat plants we humans cultivate for our own food or beauty. We spray those plants to keep bugs from munching on them. And in most cases, insecticides are used incorrectly. So its not unreasonable to say that an undersprayed plant was infested by bugs that didn't die from eating it. But they absorbed the toxins in their bodies and pass it on down the food chain.

No one sprayed DDT on the bald eagles. We sprayed our plants with it to rid the bugs off them. It worked its way up the food chain, rung by rung, until it managed to poison the top predators. A top predator eats many, many smaller things and the poisons accumulate per rung to insane levels once you get to the top of the food chain.

So THAT being said, I wouldn't use ANY spider as a feeder for my tarantulas. It's not worth the risk of a potent shot of insecticides they're not resistant to nor the potential for that spider to turn around and nip your tarantula as well.

Besides, those fat orb weavers do a lot of good at pest control. Leave them be and use feeder roaches or crickets instead.
 

Snipes

Arachnoprince
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Feb 25, 2005
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Spiders are top predators in the bug world. They eat anything that happens upon them. So just because the spider itself hasn't been sprayed with an insecticide doesn't mean it hasn't ingested them.
Predators are very likely to have pesticides. Say if it eats three flies that have pesticides, it has three times the amount of them. I work with orcas, and they have the most amount of PCBs (Polychlorinated byphenals) of any marine mammal in the area because it starts with the silt and the smaller organisms are eaten by bigger ones and so on til we get to the orcas and they eat PCB laced salmon. So i will also caveat as Taceas does and say that it isnt a good idea.
 

Windchaser

Arachnoking
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Dec 13, 2004
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I mentioned this in the mantis thread as well. I would never recommend feeding a predator to a predator. You could easily end up feeding your tarantula to what you thought was its prey. It may not happen often but odds are it will happen at some point.
 

NixHexDude

Arachnoknight
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Apr 20, 2006
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298
I completely agree. I lost a really cool wolf spider to a few hungry crickets. After that I'd never dream of putting anything with my T's that could hurt them under any reasonable circumstance. That and a predator accumulates a lot more in the way of pesticides as was previously mentioned.
 

parrington21

Arachnopeon
Joined
Aug 8, 2006
Messages
26
i personally wouldnt feed my sling another predator as the chance of the T getting injured, but what everyone is saying about the pestisides, surley if the spider you caught has eaten something harmful it would kill that spider before you have to chance to catch it???
 

Taceas

Arachnolord
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May 12, 2006
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658
parrington21 said:
surley if the spider you caught has eaten something harmful it would kill that spider before you have to chance to catch it???
Not necessarily. Some common pest species are becoming resistant to certain pesticides due to their over-use and incorrect application in most cases. The old saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is quite true for all circles of life not just humans with a mid-life crisis.

Especially in the US, pesticides are so endemic in the natural life cycles anymore, that common and wild species have more than likely built up a natural immunity of sorts to the pesticides. Tarantulas who were born and bred in captivity on captive bred foods that were fed as decent of a diet as could be probably don't have near the levels those wild species have.

It's similar to the Europeans first colonizing the Americas. The Europeans were infected with smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, and everything else nasty at the time, while very few people died back home in Europe. They'd been living in squalid conditions so long with the diseases, they carried more or less an immunity that lessened the severity of the diseases. But when the native peoples of the Americas were confronted with what were seemingly inconvenient illnesses....it wiped entire villages out because they had absolutely no immunity against the viruses/bacteria. Their bodies have never had to fight them before.

In my opinion, the same is true of Tarantulas. Compared to their wild brethren, they live in near sterile conditions never being exposed to toxins or parasites. So to again reiterate, I would never feed a wild predator species to any of my Tarantulas for the two reasons I outlined earlier. It's just not worth the risk for the "coolness factor".
 

dtknow

Arachnoking
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Aug 18, 2004
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2,239
Probably more due to natural selection than any toughening of the individuals in the species. So you can argue since(if) our T's in the wild and captivity are not exposed to pesticides they would be less tolerant as they've never had that selection pressure
 
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