My T is farming mushrroms:S

Well I woke up today to find 3 yellow mushrooms in the G.rosea's tank. We have been having a huge heat wave here the past few days arround 39 Celcius
( thats about 102.2 Fahrenheit) and i know there's preety bad ventilation in the tank and thats prolly wot made the mushrooms grow. but can they be harmfull to the T in any way? I think they look cool

well rosies like it as dry as dry can b.. so how is their enough moisture for a mushroom to b able to grow.

and eat it and see wat happens.

It could be a local species or some type of spore that came in on your substrate. You'll want to pull them out with tweezers or gloves before they dry out or else the spores will get released everywhere. Depending on the species contact with the fungi or spore may make you or the tarantula sick.

you didn't teach him how to farm from face book did you?

Whoa...

I just want to say for the record, that's awesome! Lol. But I have to agree, I would think the mushrooms are a bad thing.

Mushrooms

I am not a microbiologist or anything, but I have read about mushrooms a bit.
There are 2 things I would worry about. 1. Put more ventilation in. If the mushroom can grow in there it is too humid which is bad for the G. rosea.
2. I don't think the T is going to go chewing on it. But the spores may be a problem is such close confines with little ventilation. The spores are tiny and there are huge numbers of them(depending on species, I believe spore counts range from hundreds of thousands to millions, but I could be off a little). I could see an issue with them coating the book lungs.

All of that said, I want to create vivarium for humid species including bioluminescent mushrooms. I would contain them to a small percentage of surface structure, hope for the best, and return with my findings. But if I do this, I will assume the tarantula will die, and if it doesn't, awesome.

i was expecting to see an Aphonopelma from Humboldt Co. =P

unfortulately theres not much i can do about humidity, Cyprus has 90% humidity and 39degrees celcius. Ill see what ill do about the ventilation.

well.... i could maybe see how to lower humidity in the cage, maybe


if you keep the vent down and put DRY water crystals in a cloth pouch they *might* absorb water out of the air

i know there are other chemicals that definitely will absorb moisture out of the air but i don't know that they are safe for buggies

water crystals

Good idea caso! You can get these at gardening shops often. I have some around here. There are resusable ones too you just throw in the oven and turn different colors when wet/dry. you could put them in cotton sack and be fine. More ventilation will help too.

As to the humboldt tarantula, that can't be it, it would have already gotten hungry and wondered about the alkaloid content of that mushroom and eaten it. Plus, T's don't get dreads! )

You could just put the substrate in the oven every now and then to dry it out thoroughly. I'd avoid putting the T in with it though, lol.

Nomadinexile said:

Good idea caso! You can get these at gardening shops often. I have some around here. There are resusable ones too you just throw in the oven and turn different colors when wet/dry. you could put them in cotton sack and be fine. More ventilation will help too.

As to the humboldt tarantula, that can't be it, it would have already gotten hungry and wondered about the alkaloid content of that mushroom and eaten it. Plus, T's don't get dreads! )

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my concern with increasing ventilation is that you would be letting more 30+C/90%RH air in... which is just filthy with water. it seems like you wouldn't really be able to drop the RH in the cage that much with a high flow through... you would extract a bit of water from the air only to have more wet air put in the cage. i don't know though, it is a bit beyond my ability to accurately guess what would happen


oh, and heh. plus, you would have to start feeding all your crickets granola and stuff =P

Vegetarian T's?

I went to a vegetarian coffee shop/cafe a week or two, and had someone ask if my new T sling I brought was vegetarian. They may have been kidding, but I wasn't really sure! But they looked like they just got off the further bus too so....

Your right about venting letting in more humidity. Problem is, it will come in anyway. He can't restrict ventilation entirely. Your best option would be to buy a hydroponics grow tent (Homebox, Darkroom), and hook up exaust fan to timer. You could run air through dehumidifier (including homemade one with water crystals) on intake. Depending, you could run it as negative or positive pressure. I believe positive is what you want for humidity control. Anyway, this could be expensive, or you could build your own, hook up a 20 watt light bulb, and you could control humidity and temps as much as you want. (Temps drops would require either AC or evaporative cooling which would require 2x daily attention at least). Good luck! If you have any questions on the evaporative cooling thing or anything else, feel free to pm me. I don't know much, but I will share what I do know. :O) ryan