Having a rose hair tarantula can have its benefits. One thing I’ve learned through the COVID-19 quarantine is to be thankful that due to Spidey’s terrible long term fasting period last year, her cockroaches had the opportunity to reproduce quite a bit and I now have a literal colony of dubia roaches. Little did I know that in 2020, this unintentional colony would provide VERY useful as the coronavirus swept over the entire world and I could no longer visit my local exotics shop or rely on shipments of spider food.

I was far from alone, and I got a few questions on my YouTube channel about how tarantula owners should go about getting their beloved pets food during this difficult period, when it was unsafe to go out. Fortunately, some tarantula breeders were still shipping and delivering during this time, however delays in postal service undoubtedly made this a stressful experience for those who had to rely on it. Desperate, worried tarantula owners might even try to get very creative and take matters into their own hands.

And that’s the topic of this post – what NOT to do. What NOT to feed your spider during a pandemic, or any other time when spider food is scarce. In a pinch, many unasuming tarantula owners might believe that if they are lucky enough to stumble upon a cockroach roaming around their house, or a beetle in their backyard, this would be a good way to get their tarantula through a few weeks where they might not otherwise have a meal. And that would make sense, if it weren’t so dangerous!

Feeding your tarantula a bug from outside has many risks. Contamination or contact with pesticides, for one – and that’s certainly not something you want to expose your tarantula to. And of course, any sort of disease or parasites the bug might have. There are a lot of nasty things outside, and you don’t want your tarantula to be impacted by this. The same could be said for the common household cockroach or bug. While they might not be exposed to pesticides, household bugs can be exposed to a wide variety of chemicals that we use for cleaning, freshening the air, etc. These are also things you don’t want your spider to have any contact with.

The reason it’s advised that you only give your tarantula feeders that have come from a shop or someone who breeds these bugs is that their environment has been controlled. A good seller of feeders keeps their bugs in a stable, safe and clean environment, where they cannot be exposed to the things that could put your spider at risk. The bugs have a better chance of arriving to you in healthy condition.

But not all hope is lost if you cannot get a shipment of feeders. Fortunately, tarantulas are incredible creatures who actually need very little to survive in most cases. If your tarantula has to go without food for a few weeks, they will most likely be fine as long as they have water! My grammostola rosea regularly goes 6+ months without food and she is still healthy and plump! Fasting for those periods does not seem to impact her at all. And slings, despite needing to be fed more regularly, can also go a few weeks without food if they must. So in many cases, you do not need to worry so much.

And now that I have seen others go through this and have this concern for their tarantula, if I could give any advice in the instance of another pandemic or emergency, it would be to start your own dubia roach colony. Starting a colony of crickets may be hard because in my experience the lifespan of crickets in captivity is very short even if you take good care of them. Whenever I would get a bunch of 12 crickets, it would only take a week and a half before they had all died or eaten each other. In my experience, the dubia roaches I have bought from Ill Exotics are extremely hardy and reproduced fast with minimal deaths. I literally started with 5 medium dubia roaches and 6 months later I now have 3 generations of roaches that seem to keep multiplying every few months. So while I was at first annoyed with my roach colony, it turned out to be extremely comforting and useful during the pandemic because I didn’t have to worry about food for Spidey or my sling.

I hope this is helpful! And I hope we never have a pandemic or major emergency like this again – but if in case you do find yourself in a difficult situation where you can’t get your tarantula food, I hope this will help or assist you in preparing for the worst case scenario.