I wish you luck. Mine has made it a point to chew up the opisthosoma of every single molt its given me. Everything else is always perfectly intact - it's like the little beast is mocking me. :laugh:
I can imagine the difference is only in the fat% in the meat. Everything else should be almost exactly the same. Also, eating a single mouse in nature means 20+ crickets in proteins, if not more.
I'm not sure why you would think fat the only difference. There could be differences in calcium content, protein content, iron content, LDL versus HDL cholesterol, etc. Different meats clearly cannot be chemically identical or they wouldn't taste and look different. (See steak versus chicken, http://www.sparkpeople.com/food_vs_food.asp?food=1_5_steak_versus_chicken , and that just shows two we typically eat. Who knows what the comparison of steak v. small rodent would be... )
An occasional rodent is though. Especially for the giants like Goliath, LP, LD, blondi, etc. will I ever feed a rodent to them? Doubtful tbh, maybe when their full grown and if I decide to breed them I MIGHT feed my females a pinkie mouse a couple of days before pairing and maybe a couple of weeks after if I suspect they're gravid. Again, doubtful.
Arguments can be made for the very occasional pinkie. But steak? I just don't see why you would.
I didn't say I support steak feeding, but like I said - close to no difference and if the T dislikes it/considers it hazardous to its health it simply will not eat it. Besides - we don't really know much about tarantulas in their natural environment and how they act, so we're just making assumptions here. My point - I doubt feeding steak would be a big deal if the cow wasn't fed steroids and other crap. BUT I would not do it, because I have enough feeders. I wouldn't even feed mice or lizards to my Ts, because live mice are dangerous.
Not easy to eat a car when you're an ant.
Actually, it seems many posters here don't mimic the natural environments of tarantulas at all really, and don't advocate keeping them in natural enclosures or under semi-natural conditions whatsoever.
And most of them are hard to mimic at all. Especially montane environment.
Indeed. When I got into the hobby in the early nineties, I remember reading in one of the few books available at the time that the best method was to tie a piece of string around the cube of meat and dangle it in front of the T. Never tried it myself but it was advised as an acceptable food source at that time. Saying that, in those days it was also considered acceptable to use aquarium gravel as substrate!!!
You know what is also correlated? Flowers and heat stroke. Spiders need balanced diets like any other animal and we don't even know what their dietary requirements are. This is dogma that people have been spreading for a while, I recall asking an arachnologist about it and she said that spiders probably excrete out any extra vitamins/materials that they don't need like any other animal and that a nice varied diet leads to a heathy spider. Of course there are people who just exclusively feed one thing or another and don't have problems, I think there is more to the "wet molt" issue than just eating a mouse; said mouse could have been contaminated with something that led to the exo not forming properly.
It's a bit hard to do so when you don't have the means to individually calibrate each part of the room to a certain temperature. Though I've found my pokies to be much better eaters if I mimic the wet and dry season they experience so I at least attempt to do that for them. I know I can't recreate the microclimate that may be found in burrows but I'm a little more generous with water when it comes to my P.muticus, as a result I see much better size gains per molt and the specimen in general is more easy to deal with.
Well, sure. Nowhere was I saying that it means "feed a mouse, kill your spider." I was just trying to point out that there are many question marks about giving Ts hamburger or steak as part of their regular diet, and the wet molt issue is one of them. Not a "reason," but one of many factors one should consider.
Probably a good chance that additives mess up the formation of the exo, the most nutritious parts of the animal are the parts that we throw out generally (organs, eyes etc) so an imbalance of nutrients would not surprise me here. I thought you were referring to people scared of "feeding too much calcium" to cause a wet molt. I think at the end of the day if your spider gets a variety of food, a piece of steak once wouldn't hurt. Though I wouldn't waste that meat on a spider and I don't feel like having a rancid cage because I wanted the "novelty" of feeding a spider steak.
If I were to say, slaughter a chicken I think a heart or other organ might make a nice treat. In reality my feeders get fed a decent diet so it's not like that I don't care about nutrition for my pets.