How to Feed a Pet Chaco Tarantula

Video Transcript

"Feeding your tarantula is fairly simple. All you do is take their food item such as this spotted cockroach. Open up the enclosure, drop the cockroach in and pretty much a tarantula will do everything else. Now when a tarantula grabs its' prey, it uses its' front two legs called petapalps, well their actually not part of the legs at all although hey look like legs but their actually just assist in helping the spider hold its food. So it'll grab the food with its petapalps and bring it underneath its body where its fangs are located. Now the fangs are like sharp talents, they'll actually go right through the cockroaches excess skeleton and puncture it, and out of the fangs will come the venom. The venom doesn't only paralyze the cockroach or paralyze the prey item, but it starts to digest the prey item, it's like a stomach acid. It goes into the prey, paralyses it, and start turning everything inside of the cockroach or into the prey item into more like a moosh into like a soup, and then the tarantula will just suck it up through its mouth parts. Now, it's kind of gross to us how tarantulas eat but you have to remember they don't have mouths like we do, they can't take a bite of their food, chew it up and swallow it. Spiders have to make their food into a liquid and drink it. So they're not just drinking the blood out of their prey items, they're actually dissolving everything inside that animal and drinking everything. So when they eat an insect, all they leave is the empty shell."