When I see videos of keepers taking a tarantula egg sac away from its mother, its easy for me to start feeling extremely bad for the devastated tarantula mom, who you can see usually puts up quite a fight and can even spend hours looking for her egg sac after being separated from it. For those who are not familiar with this process, it might seem unnecessarily cruel and heartless to do this to a new tarantula mother.

Why does this happen? Why are all these “heartless” owners pulling a tarantula egg sac away from its mother who is diligently guarding and caring for it? Well, there’s a really good reason. It may look like this new tarantula mom is taking good care of their egg sac, but that’s not always the case. In fact, it’s quite common for the tarantula eggs to be consumed by their mother. Others also choose to pull the tarantula egg sac because it makes it easier to separate the babies when they hatch rather than leaving them in the enclosure with mom.

There are varied responses, though. According to some research I did on arachnoboards and tarantulaforums, some tarantula owners believe that leaving the egg sac with the mother will yield more healthy slings if you’re willing to risk the possibility that the mother may eat her eggs. For many tarantula owners, that is too big of a risk. Many T owners choose to wait approximately 30 days before pulling a tarantula egg sac, which should give the mother enough time to care for the sac and get things started. Once the eggs are pulled, you’ll have to put the sac in a manual incubator until they hatch, to take the place of the mother tarantula. This incubator will be required to provide similar circumstances with the mother such as turning the egg sac, but in a more controlled and predictable environment.

If you’d like to learn about how a manual incubator for a tarantula egg sac works, check out this video:

I know it’s heartbreaking to see a tarantula mother get defensive and upset, putting up a big fuss and fight when her egg sac is being pulled. It makes me sad, too! But it seems that there is definitely good reason to protect the egg sac, and hopefully this results in healthy tarantula slings!