Why should we care about the tarantula diet?

Finding the perfect tarantula diet and nutrition plan can be a little bit confusing for new tarantula owners – with all of the behaviors, care requirements and enclosure details you’ll be worrying about, sometimes the nutritional stuff can take a back burner until you’ve exhausted all the other info you need to learn and then think “What the hell am I going to feed this thing?!”

Now, this might seem like a simple answer. After all, tarantulas are spiders, and spiders eat bugs – but if you want to give your pet tarantula a life of optimum health, longevity and as few medical complications as possible, a good tarantula diet and feeding routine are crucial.

Disclaimer:

Before I get too far, I want to say that while it may be tempting to just go in your backyard and catch some bugs (or, if you live in a city apartment like me, trap an intruding cockroach lol), these are NOT advised to be fed to your tarantula. Bugs from outside or wandering around your apartment building or home may have been exposed to pesticides, chemicals, parasites, or other harmful ailments that may not be good for your tarantula. It’s safest to buy your bugs from a pet store or breeder that raises feeders in house or at least obtains them from a safe environment. Disclaimer over!

What should a tarantula diet consist of?

A well-rounded tarantula diet should have some variety in nutritional value. That said, not all bugs are created equal (sorry, feeders!). Just like human food, bugs have their own nutritional content and some are superior for optimum tarantula health. The most common foods are roaches such as dubia roaches or red runners, crickets, and worms such as superworms or mealworms for slings. Worms are generally more fatty than roaches and crickets, so adding them in as part of a tarantula’s diet instead of the only component can be a good way to keep your tarantula’s diet balanced. Generally, roaches and crickets are thought to contain the most nutritional value for tarantulas.

My personal experience with feeders

I feed my A. chalcodes sling Blinky crickets, which this little spider loves! With Spidey, my elderly G. rosea, I had been feeding her only superworms for years because she was way too slow for crickets. Last year, I read more about nutritional value of feeders and decided to try to get her on dubia roaches instead, as she tended to gain weight quickly and I wanted to see if her appetite would be more regulated with something less fatty (she’s notorious for fasting). Well, I got her a dubia and the first time I tried it she hated it and wouldn’t go near it. So the dubia roach became our “pet” for nearly 6 months until finally I made one last attempt and SHE ATE IT!!! Now that I know Spidey will eat roaches, I intend to give these to her more often than worms and look forward to seeing if there are any changes in her appetite or fasting routine.

Another important component to tarantula diet and nutrition:

The other thing that matters quite a bit when feeding your tarantula is the health of the feeders. There is a thing called gut loading in the tarantula community, and that’s when you feed your tarantula’s future food a good assortment of nutrients so that your tarantula benefits from the nutrition and health of the feeder.

Fortunately, the feeders that make up the tarantula diet will eat just about anything. You can feed roaches, crickets, and worms pretty much anything from cereal to sliced potatoes to fruit to veggies (I use potatoes and apples a lot). These guys are NOT picky. But you can also buy special feeder gel that will also give your feeders the nutrition they need to stay alive and be healthy until they get to your tarantula.

So, you definitely want to make sure your feeders are healthy because you don’t want your tarantula to be eating sick or malnourished prey, where it can’t get all the nutrients.

Other feeding alternatives (that may not be so great)

Tarantulas will eat pretty much anything they can in the wild, whether or not it’s good for them. In the wild, they are forced to be opportunistic and their nutritional needs will be the last thing on their minds in survival mode. Fortunately, captive tarantulas get the royal treatment from owners who care about what they eat.

Ethical concerns aside, there is a major debate in the tarantula hobby over whether or not things like mice, pinky mice, lizards or other mammals belong in the tarantula diet. There have been mixed reviews about whether the calcium in mice cannot be digested properly and can cause complications for tarantulas (I wrote a whole post on the mice controversy here). Whether you feed these animals to your tarantula is your business, but know that smaller bugs are perfectly adequate nutrition for you tarantula and mammals are not needed. It is agreed upon in the hobby that if you do feed these animals or reptiles to your tarantula, they should not be a large part of the tarantula diet.

Other things to think about

The other important components of a tarantula diet and meal plan is not only the nutritional aspect and the kind of food items, but how large they are, the amounts you’re feeding, and the frequency – all of these will impact your tarantula’s health. Power feeding, the practice of purposefully overfeeding a tarantula to help it grow faster, is generally unecessary unless you have a sling that you’re trying to get out of that vulnerable phase faster. Older tarantulas do not need to eat as frequently as new tarantula owners think they do (generally once per week or even less is fine). Food items should also be smaller than the tarantula to avoid injury and ensure successful hunting.

More info on tarantula diets to come!

That’s all I have for now on tarantula diet info and nutrition! I hope that was useful, and I will be going more into this topic in the future with a post on how to create a feeding routine for your tarantula. Stay tuned!

I hope this helped you! By the way, check out my new tarantula magazine for more cool spider stuff:

I’m putting out issues every 2 months! If you’d like to be a part of that, you can visit the magazine’s Patreon page to subscribe or make a submission! You can also contact me at theavenmag@gmail.com for more info!

If you want to learn more about tarantulas, feel free to check out my big tarantula guide (I talk about lots of tarantula facts and enclosure/care tips). You can also get free tarantula tips by signing up for my newsletter or subscribing to my YouTube channel! I release new tips every Tuesday for Tarantula Tuesday! And I also sell some pretty cool tarantula t-shirts, if I do say so myself 😉