Can You Overfeed A Pet Tarantula?
Many people who own pet tarantulas become seriously concerned with their spider’s health when they discover that they just won’t eat anymore. It’s something that happens quite often and being uneducated on tarantulas’ behavior around food might make it look like they are about to die, or that they are having a serious illness. In reality—9 out of 10 times—there’s no reason for concern.
Is Overfeeding A Tarantula Dangerous To Their Health?
In nature, tarantulas just don’t eat all that much. Four to five large crickets every ten days or so (one every two days) will do just fine. However, there are situations where tarantulas either want to eat more than they normally do, or the exact opposite—they won’t touch food for months. These shouldn’t be a reason for concern, but there are some aspects that need to be considered.
First of all, tarantulas’ digestive system is very fragile, and it requires a lot of work for them to gulp down just one cricket. That’s because their mouth is extremely small, and having a tubular shape, it can only suck in liquified food. Tarantulas do not eat their prey whole! This process sees the tarantula coating their prey with digestive juices, crushing them and ripping their interiors apart.
Once the tarantula is able to tap into the newly produced “innards juice,” they start sucking in all the nutritious elements of their prey, leaving the carcass nicely rolled up into a ball of goop. This is the main reason why tarantulas don’t eat all that often; it takes a lot of energy for them to get it done, and once they do, their digestive system slowly breaks the liquid down even further.
How Often Should You Be Feeding Your Tarantula?
If you’re feeding your tarantula every single day, you’re definitely overfeeding it. This doesn’t mean that you’re killing it, but that they’ll probably react in weird ways. The most common scenario is that they’ll simply stop eating, or that they’ll feel stressed, especially if they have live prey in their terrarium while they are still digesting the rest. They just can’t do anything about it.
In addition, tarantulas molt. It’s not that common in males, but females do it about once a year, and when they do, you might as well leave them alone because they won’t eat a thing. The process of molting is very slow, and tarantulas know that it’s going to happen weeks before you even realize. During this period, they just won’t eat anything because they are literally shedding their exoskeleton in order to mature. I don’t know about you but that sounds stressful to me.
So, how often should you be feeding your tarantula? It depends on the size of the prey, but once or twice a week will do the trick. If you are able to keep a good schedule, tarantulas will eat regularly, but if you overfeed them, their metabolism will become unbalanced, making it harder and harder for you to understand when and how you should feed your tarantula.
Having taken all of this into consideration, there’s a piece to the puzzle that hasn’t been solved yet. Sometimes, tarantulas just won’t eat, for no reason whatsoever. They’re not sick, they’re not about to die, they’re not about to molt, and they’re not digesting any other food. But they’ll simply refuse to eat. Nobody knows why, but at that point, you really can’t do anything about it.
In these cases, pay close attention to their behavior. Are they curling their legs under their body and having spams from time to time (stretching the legs outwards)? If this happens, your tarantula is at the end of their life span, and they have a good reason not to eat. They’re dying.
