Tarantula Food Guide

Selecting the right food for your tarantula is pretty easy.

The main thing you need to make sure is that the prey is not too large. Too large prey can potentially hurt your tarantula.

While some people might think it is cool to feed mice to a fully grown tarantula, the truth is that this is both unnecessarily cruel for the mamal, but also poses danger to your tarantula.

So what should you feed your tarantula then?

Mainly crickets. But we’ll walk you through it in this guide.

What is the standard diet of a tarantula?

The basic diet of tarantulas consists of crickets.

Additionally, many tarantulas will also appreciate cockroaches as food. Large maggots can also be a nutritious source of food for your tarantula.

How often should you feed your pet tarantula?

We have written an article about how often you should feed your pet tarantula.

The key take away here is that it depends on the species, and that you will have to monitor closely how much food your tarantula needs. Some tarantula species are know not to eat for over a year!

So its hard to overfeed a tarantula…

When your tarantula isn’t feeding, you need to make sure that you remove all the prey from your tarantula’s habitat.

Some prey will burry itself, attack your tarantula while it is molting, and other prey will die and rot.

So, in any case, it is in the best interest of your tarantula’s health to remove the prey if your tarantula doesn’t show any interest in eating it immediately.

How to feed a spiderling / young tarantula

Feeding a young tarantula means you have to do a little more work. Instead of feeding it live prey, you need to pre kill it.

Kill the cricket or roaches that you feed your spiderling.

Then cut it up in smaller pieces. Don’t cut them too small, but the prey should never be bigger than the tarnatula itself.

Lastly, make sure the cut up prey is directly noticed by your spiderling. You can do this by feeding the prey to your tarantula with a tweezer.