One thing I often get asked about is what new tarantula owners should feed their new spiders. It’s also the most common question that I get asked by non-tarantula owners – the general public just LOVES to ask what tarantulas eat! First I’ll answer this in a basic way and then I’ll talk about what I personally do with my tarantulas.

So, tarantulas can eat a variety of things. They’re opportunistic feeders, and you might even see videos of tarantulas eating mice, lizards, opossums, and many other small animals. That’s because in the wild, they will! Tarantulas don’t know when their next meal is coming, and if they are able to take down another animal, they will. However, in captivity they are often fed bugs. This is generally safe to do across species, regardless whether a tarantula is New World, Old World, arboreal or terrestrial.

These bugs can range from different varieties of locusts, cockroaches, crickets, and worms (such as mealworms and superworms). Bugs are most common for tarantulas in captivity, and are thought to be the most practical, cost effective, nutritious, safe, and ethical. These “feeders” can be found at local pet shops (even some mainstream ones will at least have one kind of these bugs), or they can be ordered and shipped from a reputable breeder of feeders.

What I feed my tarantulas

I’ve had my tarantula Spidey, a chilean rose hair, since 2013 and I’ve tried a few different feeders before settling on dubia cockroaches. I first started out with crickets, and didn’t have much of a great experience. I realized that crickets were hard to keep alive even when regularly giving them food – they had a high rate of cannibalism even when well fed, and often died in a few days despite my efforts to keep them alive until Spidey could eat them all. The crickets were also noisy and smelly, which was not fun. Fortunately, Spidey had a hard time catching the crickets anyway, so I ended up changing her feeders to superworms.

Superworms (basically big mealworms) come in a variety of sizes. She is a big girl (adult) and so she got some juicy ones. Because they were slower than the crickets, Spidey had an easier time getting them so feedings became a little easier (just a LITTLe easier, she would still let them get away sometimes!). I found the mealworms to be a little easier to keep alive than crickets, but it seemed the most they would stay alive for was 2-3 weeks if I was lucky. Considering that Spidey loves to fast for weeks at a time, this was inconvenient. The superworms, although silent, were also very stinky and gross. And I was NOT happy when they would get away from Spidey, because they would burrow and make a gross mess of her substrate if I couldn’t grab them in time. In the next (and hopefully final) phase of Spidey’s feeding journey, I changed her to cockroaches.

There are a lot of different varieties of cockroaches, I use dubias because they were the kind my local exotics shop, Ill Exotics, had and Spidey likes them. Roaches are what I had the most success with for many reasons – they don’t burrow, they are slow enough for Spidey to get them, they don’t smell, and they live for a long time without much effort by me. Oh, AND they reproduce quickly, allowing me to grow a colony that sustains itself so I don’t have to get feeders too often. I have had my roaches for over a year now and only have one die occasionally. All they need are some produce scraps and you can leave them for days. They are very hardy. This was also a very convenient solution when I got Blinky, my baby Arizona blonde sling, because I was able to give Blinky the tiny baby roaches that came from Spideys roaches that reproduced.

Overall, I’ve had the best response from my tarantulas with roaches, and I’ve also found them to be more practical for many reasons. Everyone has their own preferences and systems with feeders – it’s really about finding what works for you, your spider, and is easily accessible for you.

Just as a side note – do NOT feed your tarantulas bugs from around your home or outside! Buy them from an actual store that uses safe conditions to breed their bugs so you don’t expose your Ts to pesticides, chemicals, or disease. You can read more about that here.