Today I’m going to use my own personal experience to tell you about one of the worst things you can put in tarantula enclosures.

I am going to be honest, when I first got into the tarantula keeping hobby I made a LOT of embarrassing mistakes. And mistakes are SO easy to make! Tarantulas are unlike so many of our other pets and require completely different care – even if you spend weeks researching, you’re bound to overlook a few things and make a few mistakes. It’s all part of the journey, but maybe I can help save you from one of the biggest messups I see new T owners make in their tarantula enclosures.

Now, my mistake was partially due to another mistake a made, which was going to a local pet store for my first tarantula. Don’t do this! Any mainstream pet store that does not specialize in exotic pets will likely not know anything about their tarantulas OR how to care for them. Which brings me to my next mistake, where I was talked into buying a ton of crap for my tarantula Spidey that she didn’t actually need. One of those was something that’s actually very dangerous to put in tarantula enclosures: the sponge.

Here’s my Spidey with the sponge in her water dish. I got blasted for this as soon as I posted it on her Tumblr blog, and although it was hard to hear I’m extremely thankful for that lesson. I had no idea at the time, but sponges are TERRIBLE for tarantula enclosures!

WHY?

Well, not only are they completely USELESS (no, your tarantula will NOT drown in its water dish), but they are a breeding ground for very harmful bacteria that could contaminate your tarantula’s tank and pose a big risk to your tarantula! There’s TONS of data on this, but it often gets overlooked by new tarantula owners because there are so many other things to worry about! And if you’ve made this mistake, don’t worry – even the most experienced tarantula owners have messed up in the beginning. Even the very popular Tom Moran of Tom’s Big Spiders even made this mistake as a new tarantula owner. In a great post about what he wished he’d known when he first started keeping tarantulas, here’s what he learned about sponges:

Tarantula can drink just fine out of water dishes. For the first several months I kept my G. porteri, I had a chunk of natural sponge in its water dish. After all, I was told that tarantulas couldn’t drink from just a normal dish, and that they needed a sponge to “suck the water out with their fangs.”

I can’t even begin to explain how embarrassingly wrong this is.

First off, tarantulas have mouths to drink and eat. Their fangs are meant to inject venom, not to suck up water like two pointy straws. Trust me, I’ve seen mine drink directly from their water dishes many times. Secondly, sponges are incredibly unsanitary and will soon turn a water bowl into a veritable petri dish of bacteria. They serve no purpose in a tarantula’s home.

Even the best of us had to learn the hard way! I hope this post helped you rethink putting these harmful sponges into your tarantula enclosures – and if a misguided pet store employee tries to convince you otherwise, just know that you shouldn’t listen to anything else that person says lol.

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 😉