brachypelma
New Member
- Messages
- 3
- Location
- UK
I'm not really new to keeping tarantulas, we have quite a few, but like most wives mine say "no more!".
My wife and I initially started with a pair of jumping spiders, but as you probably know, this hobby quickly grows once you get into it. We mostly deal with "The Spider Shop" but also shop locally for crickets, locusts, etc. We buy food locally because we also keep crested geckos, gargoyle geckos, and a Chinese Green Water Dragon, so we have some pretty large enclosures in our home. We breed our own fruit flies for the baby jumping spiders. I bought my wife 3 dwarf tarantulas from The Spider Shop, I must admit the one was smaller than a money spider, its only 0.5 in legspan! But he's growing like the other two.
We've successfully bred jumping spiders (they're all eating fruit flies now), but we still need to move each one to its own enclosure before they start eating each other. Unfortunately, we lost the mother of the babies, but we still have the male.
Currently, I'm re-housing an Asian Fawn (yes, the bitey one! lol) and a Salmon Pink Toe (which is already bigger than most of my others!). Both are juveniles but still quite aggressive. I re-homed my Mexican Red Rump (he's very docile), and I was going to re-home my Curly Hair, but he decided to molt just as I got the new enclosure. I think my Mexican Red Knee (18 months old) has buried himself to molt again.
I also have two Heterometrus spinifer scorpions. One was a scorpling late last year, and I bought a larger, older one (bigger enclosure!) this year. It amazes me that a large scorpion hasn't caught and eaten a Dubia roach that's in his tank (I guess the roach is lucky!), but crickets—well, I only ever see the back legs; everything else gets eaten.
I learned the hard way never to put a cleanup crew in with scorpions—they'll eat all the isopods and become obese quickly! I have a huge collection of isopods that breed like crazy (worse than rabbits!). I originally started with about 20 mixed ones as a cleanup crew in a Crested Gecko tank, but they bred out of control, so I added more to another gecko tank with springtails, and some with African Sun Beetles. In that tank, when I mist it, they come out from everywhere—literally hundreds of mixed isopods! Now, I just keep them with the African Sun Beetles and larvae (which the Chinese Water Dragon eats).
I think that wraps it up for my introduction on here. We still got a lot of work to do with re-homing baby jumping spiders and 2 junior sized tarantulas (very large when adults!).
My wife and I initially started with a pair of jumping spiders, but as you probably know, this hobby quickly grows once you get into it. We mostly deal with "The Spider Shop" but also shop locally for crickets, locusts, etc. We buy food locally because we also keep crested geckos, gargoyle geckos, and a Chinese Green Water Dragon, so we have some pretty large enclosures in our home. We breed our own fruit flies for the baby jumping spiders. I bought my wife 3 dwarf tarantulas from The Spider Shop, I must admit the one was smaller than a money spider, its only 0.5 in legspan! But he's growing like the other two.
We've successfully bred jumping spiders (they're all eating fruit flies now), but we still need to move each one to its own enclosure before they start eating each other. Unfortunately, we lost the mother of the babies, but we still have the male.
Currently, I'm re-housing an Asian Fawn (yes, the bitey one! lol) and a Salmon Pink Toe (which is already bigger than most of my others!). Both are juveniles but still quite aggressive. I re-homed my Mexican Red Rump (he's very docile), and I was going to re-home my Curly Hair, but he decided to molt just as I got the new enclosure. I think my Mexican Red Knee (18 months old) has buried himself to molt again.
I also have two Heterometrus spinifer scorpions. One was a scorpling late last year, and I bought a larger, older one (bigger enclosure!) this year. It amazes me that a large scorpion hasn't caught and eaten a Dubia roach that's in his tank (I guess the roach is lucky!), but crickets—well, I only ever see the back legs; everything else gets eaten.
I learned the hard way never to put a cleanup crew in with scorpions—they'll eat all the isopods and become obese quickly! I have a huge collection of isopods that breed like crazy (worse than rabbits!). I originally started with about 20 mixed ones as a cleanup crew in a Crested Gecko tank, but they bred out of control, so I added more to another gecko tank with springtails, and some with African Sun Beetles. In that tank, when I mist it, they come out from everywhere—literally hundreds of mixed isopods! Now, I just keep them with the African Sun Beetles and larvae (which the Chinese Water Dragon eats).
I think that wraps it up for my introduction on here. We still got a lot of work to do with re-homing baby jumping spiders and 2 junior sized tarantulas (very large when adults!).
