What to Feed a Pet Chaco Tarantula

Video Transcript

"All spiders are carnivores and therefore prefer to eat meat. Now tarantulas prefer to eat live foods so you have to supply them a lot of different varieties of live smaller foods. Now what I prefer feeding my tarantulas are these guys right here, these are spotted roaches. Here is a female and here is a male, the male actually has wings, the female has little tiny wing buds right there. These guys breed very, very easily and if you get a colony of them going you'll have a constant supply of food. Here is a nymph right here for your smaller tarantulas and they even get smaller than this if you have some slings to feed it as well. They have a high meat ratio compared to their shell, so they are a great food source for your tarantulas. If you do not have small cockroaches to feed you can go with your basic tarantula food which of course is crickets. Crickets are fairly easy to keep but why they don't breed a lot of crickets is because they don't live as long as these roaches, they don't breed as quickly and also crickets tend to smell pretty bad. So if you're going to breed an insect, I highly recommend trying to breed these spotted roaches, a lot easier to breed than these crickets and they last a lot longer. Also, you can always go with meal worms. This is called a super worm and of course they're not real worms at all, in fact these are beetle grubs. Some people will feed their larger tarantulas mice. I don't recommend feeding full grown mice cause a full grown mouse has sharp teeth and could defend itself very well, actually bite and kill your tarantula. If you're going to feed your large tarantula a mouse, feed it a smaller mouse, a pinky or a fuzzy, something that cannot fight back."